The Necessary Unity of Opposites : The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye [1 ed.] 9781442687189, 9781442641600

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THE NECESSARY UNITY OF OPPOSITES: THE DIALECTICAL THINKING OF NORTHROP FRYE

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THE NECESSARY UNITY OF OPPOSITES The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye

BRIAN RUSSELL GRAHAM

U NI V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R ESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4160-0

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks Frye Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Graham, Brian Russell The necessary unity of opposites : the dialectical thinking of Northrop Frye / Brian Russell Graham. (Frye studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4160-0 1. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 – Political and social views. I. Title. II. Series: Frye studies. PN75.F7G73 2011

801’.95092

C2010-905444-X

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Michael G. DeGroote family. 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 Canada Book Fund.

To Dr Donald Mackenzie

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii 1 2

Introduction

3

Mandarin and Rebel: Frye’s Dialectical Secular Thinking 3

4

Beauty and Truth I: Frye’s Theory of Blake’s Poetry

24

Beauty and Truth II: Frye’s Theory of Secular Literature 5 6

Work and Leisure: Frye on the Individual in Society Freedom and Equality: Frye’s Political Philosophy 7

Belief and Vision: Frye on Scripture 8

Epilogue

115

Notes 119 Bibliography 127 Index 131

99

16

43 61

77

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The present study represents an attempt to write a monograph which might go some way towards explaining the importance of Frye’s thought. To anyone sympathetic to Frye’s critical practice, it is something of a mystery that he does not enjoy greater popularity in our times, though various explanations for this deficit do suggest themselves. No doubt every Frye scholar has a deep interest in setting before the reading public an account of Frye’s work which clarifies its excellence. This study discusses Frye’s work as dialectical and as what I term ‘suprahistorical,’ and it is my hope that, overall, its argument will encourage readers to consider the enormously appealing qualities of his dialectical thinking. But, as I explain throughout this monograph, Frye’s secular thinking, which makes up the best part of his work, is not just dialectical and suprahistorical but post-partisan, and this additional factor may point more specifically to what a great many readers may find of value in his thinking. Against the backdrop of highly politicized university studies, this monograph brings out the importance of Frye’s thinking by drawing the reader’s attention to the political nature of his work. Frye’s post-partisan outlook, it is my hope, is one that will appeal to a great many readers who, while generally sympathizing with the postpartisan viewpoint, have not associated it with Frye in the past. But it is also my hope that this study might convince those who think of themselves as left-of-centre or right-of-centre of the importance of Frye, too, for part of my argument is that what in our times might be thought of as left-wing or right-wing thinking is actually better thought of as postpartisan in spirit, this factor becoming abundantly clear when the relevant ideas are seen within their proper historical context.

x

Preface and Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank my family and friends, who have offered me warm support throughout the whole process, and, among my friends, I am especially thankful to Edith Raap, Gordon Purvis, Scott McDonald, and Jeremy Hall. In retrospect, it is especially touching that friends and family who were unfamiliar with Frye developed an interest in his work in order to be able to relate better to my own endeavours. (Unsurprisingly, The Educated Imagination proved to be a popular text amongst friends.) This monograph represents a significant reworking of my PhD thesis, and I am especially grateful to those who played a significant part in helping me to bring my PhD project to a happy conclusion and to those who provided me with the encouragement I needed to develop my dissertation into the present monograph. I spent my undergraduate and postgraduate years in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, and I am grateful to the department as a whole for their support. While pursuing research for my degree, Dr Alex Benchimol, at the time of my doctoral studies a fellow student, engaged me in innumerable vibrant discussions which fed into my work on Frye in different ways. During my post-graduate studies I visited the University of Toronto on three occasions as an Associate of the Northrop Frye Centre, and, in connection with these visits, I would like to thank the whole community of Frye scholars based at Victoria University in Toronto and McMaster University in Hamilton for the encouragement they offered me, and Jean O’Grady and James Carscallen in particular for their considerable generosity during these visits. Professor Robert D. Denham acted as External Examiner for my dissertation and provided guidance and support at later times as well. Ron Schoeffel, editor of the Frye Studies series at the University of Toronto Press, has been thoroughly professional and tremendously kind throughout the period I have been working on this monograph. And I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the two anonymous readers who on behalf of the University of Toronto Press read my manuscript on two separate occasions, offering incredibly insightful and useful commentaries both times. Finally, this monograph benefited greatly from the editorial work of Margaret Burgess, who, in her capacity as copyeditor, went through the book’s scholarly apparatus and main text with a fine-tooth comb, making countless useful recommendations. I am also grateful to the Michael G. DeGroote family for funding which defrayed the cost of a subsidy required for the publication of this monograph, and to Professor Alvin Lee for his decision to make funds available for this purpose.

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

The present study is a project which went from thesis to monograph, and it strikes me that at each stage of the process, the very late stages included, while practical suggestions were incredibly valuable, what confers distinction upon a critical reader of a thesis-draft or bookmanuscript is his or her ability to see in a piece of writing what it might become, and make a judgment about it based, not upon what the writer has done, but upon what he or she can do. That it has been possible to take this project so far is the direct result of those who have commented on my work being in abundant possession of the skill in question. In connection with this point, my final thanks go to Dr Donald Mackenzie, who served as my main PhD supervisor while I was a post-graduate student. It is safe to say that without the support of Dr Mackenzie at the PhD stage of the process, this monograph would not have been written. His expert supervision meant that, after some difficulties, my doctoral studies represented the most rewarding phase of my formal education. It is with great pleasure that I dedicate the present study, the end result of my attempt to realize in experience the promise of earlier drafts, to Dr Mackenzie. Brian Russell Graham

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Abbreviations

Works by Northrop Frye AC

CPCT

CR D

DV EICT

ENC

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 22. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. (Orig. pub. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.) “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 27. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Creation and Recreation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. (Rpt. in NFR.) The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. (Rpt. in NFR.) “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Imre Salusinszky. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 17. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

xiv

FI FS

GC

INF

LS

M&B

NFHK

NFMC

NFR

SE

StS WE

Abbreviations

Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Ed. Nicholas Halmi, with Introduction by Ian Singer. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. (Orig. pub. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.) The Great Code: Being a Study of the Bible and Literature. Ed. Alvin A. Lee. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 19. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. (Orig. pub. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.) Interviews with Northrop Frye. Ed. Jean O’Grady. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 24. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 16. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932– 1939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vols. 1–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 1932–1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. London: Methuen, 1970. Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Abbreviations

WP

xv

Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. (Orig. pub. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.) Works by Other Authors

Ayre Bogdan Clark Cummings

Cusset Damon

Denham Eagleton Erdman

Hart Orwell

Slan

John Ayre. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Deanne Bogdan, ‘Northrop Frye and the Defence of Literature.’ English Studies in Canada 8 (June 1982): 203–14. Lorraine Clark. Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. P.M. Cummings. ‘Northrop Frye and the Necessary Hybrid: Criticism as Aesthetic Humanism.’ In The Quest for Imagination: Essays in Twentieth-Century Aesthetic Criticism, ed. O.B. Harbison, Jr, 255–76. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971. François Cusset. French Theory. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. S. Foster Damon. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988. Robert D. Denham. ‘Frye and the Social Context of Criticism.’ South Atlantic Bulletin 39 (November 1974): 63–72. Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. David V. Erdman. Blake: Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954. Jonathan Hart. Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination. London: Routledge, 1994. George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. Jan Slan. ‘Writing in Canada: Innis, McLuhan, and Frye: Frontiers of Canadian Criticism.’ Canadian Dimension 8 (August 1972): 43–6.

xvi

Wimsatt

Abbreviations

W.K. Wimsatt. ‘Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth.’ In Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger, 75–107. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1966. Works by William Blake

(These works are cited primarily in quotations from M&B.) E

K M J

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. The Writings of William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. 3 vols. London: Nonesuch Press, 1925. (Rpt. 1957, 1966.) Milton Jerusalem

THE NECESSARY UNITY OF OPPOSITES: THE DIALECTICAL THINKING OF NORTHROP FRYE

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1 Introduction

Frye Studies Today The present time is a vibrant one for Frye studies. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, in the final stages of publication by the University of Toronto Press, is precipitating a transformation of the field. Based on the large collection of Frye’s papers in the E.J. Pratt Library of Victoria University at the University of Toronto, the Collected Works is providing us with scholarly editions of all of Frye’s works, with a total of thirty volumes planned. The publication of these volumes means that, for the first time, Frye scholars have easy access to all of his writings, including his previously unpublished work. ‘Frye was not just a prolific writer,’ explain Boyd and Salusinszky, ‘but a prolific jotter as well, and after his death in 1991 he left behind thousands of pages of notebooks, diaries, and letters.’1 And some of the first volumes of the Collected Works to appear included much previously unpublished material. These scholarly editions have already stimulated new directions in Frye studies, certain aspects of which stand out as especially noteworthy. Above all, readings of the notebooks by Frye scholars have had a profound effect on our view of Frye, for they alter our perception of his career to a considerable degree. We now know from the notebooks, for example, that he worked on a ‘third book’ between the late 1950s and early 1970s which would have served as a follow-up to Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism. In his authoritative essay on the subject, ‘The Book of the Dead,’ Michael Dolzani describes the scope of the proposed study:

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At its heart was a diagram, meditated in numerous forms over two decades but never ultimately published, called the Great Doodle – though we can call it the cycle of mythoi for solemnity’s sake. It developed out of the cycle of mythoi in the Third Essay of the Anatomy, but differs in two ways. First, it is what Frye would have called the thematic stasis of the Third Essay, taking its hero’s-quest circular narrative and spatializing it into four quadrants which he called topoi, by which he means to evoke ‘particularly their literal sense as “places”’ (NB19, 343). However, since ‘his soil is man’s intelligence,’ in Stevens’s phrase, each landscape, each ‘place,’ becomes the locus of an interconnected set of themes and thematic images, often lyric-centred … In addition, the Third Book was to explain how literature’s order of words is the shadowy prefiguration … of a totally revealed Word that is its antitype or realized form, a ‘spiritual Other’ that is beyond literature, even if it is to be arrived at by going through literature. (Rereading Frye, 22–3)

Of perhaps even greater significance is the broader discovery that throughout his working life Frye harboured a desire to write a special sequence of book-length studies, which would include the Third Book. (The Third Book would only have been the third in a much larger sequence.) Again, Dolzani is our guide: As my co-editor Robert Denham and I worked our way deeper and deeper into the branching tunnels of about ninety unorganized, undated notebooks, transcribing Frye’s difficult handwriting, we began to come upon references to eight one-word titles of what were clearly projected works, sometimes half-jokingly referred to by Frye as the ogdoad, as if they were a pantheon of eight gods – a suggestion that turned out to have several kinds of truth to it. (Rereading Frye, 20)

In ‘The Book of the Dead,’ Dolzani provides us with a definitive account of the ever-changing ‘eightfold ghost that seems to have haunted Frye for over sixty years’ (Rereading Frye, 23–4), explaining that it went through at least six clear stages of development in Frye’s mind, though ultimately it did not result in the projected series of works. In the context of such publications, the past ten years have seen a burgeoning interest in Frye’s religious thinking, and much of the vibrancy of the field also stems from this development. The posthumous publication of The Double Vision signalled the completion of Frye’s four-volume study of the Bible and literature (CR, GC, WP, and DV), and this event prompted two conferences on related themes. In 2000 an ambi-

Introduction

5

tious international conference on the subject of the religious context in the criticism of Northrop Frye, ‘Frye and the Word,’ was held at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and in 2001 this conference was supplemented by a thematically related colloquium, ‘Creation and Recreation: Northrop Frye and the United Church Ministry,’ sponsored by the Northrop Frye Centre and Victoria University: in both cases the focus of interest was the sequence of books beginning with Creation and Recreation. These conferences were followed by the publication in 2002 of Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word,2 and in 2004 of Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye,3 both containing selections of papers given at the ‘Frye and the Word’ conference. Additionally, Robert D. Denham’s Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World,4 also published in 2004, represents an exhaustive study of Frye’s religious thought which draws on a comprehensive knowledge of the notebooks. The Present Study This monograph represents an exploration of Frye’s dialectical and suprahistorical thinking. Frye thinks in terms of ‘two fundamental movements of narrative,’ these being ‘a cyclical movement within the order of nature, and a dialectical movement from that order into the apocalyptic world above’ (AC, 150). In literature, the order of nature is characterized by oppositions such as noon and night, or fountains and sea or snow, and Frye thinks of this opposition in terms of two opposing worlds: the ‘world of romance and the analogy of innocence’ and ‘the world of “realism” and the analogy of experience’ (ibid.). These two worlds stand in dialectical opposition to one another, but in the ‘apocalyptic world above’ they move dialectically beyond opposition and enter into unity. The apocalyptic world, then, must be thought of in terms of coincidentia oppositorum or unity of opposites. As I shall argue throughout this study, this view of literature and nature is thoroughly suggestive of the structure of Frye’s own thinking, for Frye also thinks in terms of dialectical opposition and cyclical movement within the area of the history of ideas. In one period of history, one half of a dialectic rises to a position of ascendancy while the other falls, only for the relation to be inverted by the next turn of the cycle. What Frye identifies with, however, is always the possibility of a third option, an alternative which is on a higher level of understanding than that of historical positions, which may be said to represent what we might term a dialectical and

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suprahistorical alternative. In each area of enquiry, Frye moves dialectically beyond the level of opposition onto a higher level where seemingly antithetical modes of thought prove to be complementary. Unity means ‘in agreement,’ and on this level the values promoted by the ordinary historical viewpoints – beauty or ‘truth,’ education or work, liberty or equality, and belief or vision – are shown to be not mutually exclusive but rather objectives which are in agreement with one another and therefore simultaneously attainable. Much of this study – chapters 2 through to 6 – is focused specifically on Frye’s secular dialectical thinking, and to develop a proper understanding of the nature of this aspect of his thought, we must go on to consider the highly political background to it and the fact that in this area Frye’s dialectical thinking is distinctly post-partisan. Frye’s politics are beyond ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ – he even speaks of the death of the ‘old “left” and “right” metaphors’ in one early piece (NFMC, 253) – but such a post-political attitude is characteristic of his secular cultural thinking, too. In a secular context, he typically thinks of the history of ideas in connection with dialectical oppositions which are highly political in nature. The suprahistorical option, however, is one which has transcended not only the level of historical, dialectically opposed ideas, but also their political associations. Chapter 7 moves beyond the secular dimension and deals with Frye’s dialectical and suprahistorical view of Scripture. It is impossible to view his theory of the Bible in terms of a political dialectic, for in that context we do not start out with a clear radical and conservative background. Historically, the Left has not produced its own version of faith and scripture, preferring anti-clericalism to a coherent hermeneutical alternative. But while his third alternative in this context does not have the same background of Left and Right, Frye’s intention in this area is to find a third position above the level of dialectically opposed and cyclically rising and falling ideas, and so this chapter nevertheless follows on logically from the chapters preceding it, completing the picture of Frye’s dialectical and suprahistorical thinking. Moreover, my commentary on Frye’s view of Scripture brings out the overarching dialectic of his career as well. The opposition between secularism and Christianity is also suggestive of a cycle in the history of ideas, and in connection with this cycle the overall structure of Frye’s writings is also a testimony to a dialectical impulse. He focused on secular themes, which led him, as we shall see, to consider the meaning of the ideals of the political Left; but at the

Introduction

7

end of his career he turns to the Christian Bible, thereby completing a neat dialectical design. In terms of the range of its focus, my study follows the example set by Jonathan Hart’s Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination.5 Hart dedicates an entire chapter to Fearful Symmetry, in addition to chapters on Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Code, Frye on education, and Frye and cultural studies. I focus on what I take to be the principal theoretical concerns of Frye’s writings: the theory of the poetry of Blake; secular literature; education and work; and the Bible. I also consider the political beliefs of Frye in the wake of the Second World War, beliefs which are a testimony to his insistence on dialectical thinking. In chapter 2, I introduce Frye’s dialectical secular thinking, arguing that it is in a very important sense Blake-inspired. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 represent studies of the dialectical, suprahistorical, and post-partisan nature of Frye’s thinking in three different areas: the focus of chapter 3 is his theory of Blake; chapter 4 deals with his literary theory; and chapter 5 is concerned with Frye’s ideas about education and work. Chapter 6 is focused on Frye’s political philosophy, which is again characterized by its dialectical nature. His interest, I explain, is in breaking free of the capitalist–communist opposition that bedevilled the world in the wake of the Second World War. My analysis of Frye’s main themes follows the chronology of his achievements. Frye started his professional career with Blake, before moving on to the theory of literature. As he gained seniority in the university, Frye increasingly turned his attention to the theory of education and work. As already indicated, towards the end of his life he devoted all his energy to his comprehensive study of the Bible and literature, and in chapter 7 the focus shifts to the last phase of Frye’s career and the sacred realm. I continue my consideration of the dialectical nature of Frye’s thinking, focusing on Frye’s ideas about the Bible. In chapters 5 and 7 of my discussion of Frye’s dialectical thinking I include short additional commentaries discussing his liberalism and Protestantism respectively. In chapter 5 I suggest we view his dialectical thinking about education and work as not simply beyond Left and Right but as politically liberal. On one level of understanding, liberalism is a theory of individual liberty. Frye views liberty as one of the goals of work and leisure and so his dialectical thinking in this area is suggestive of liberal theory. I shall define the precise nature of his liberalism in that chapter, suggesting that it ultimately represents a theory

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of liberty in which freedoms are ‘positive’ rather than ‘negative.’ I shall also go on to argue that in his view the proper goal of education and work is not simply freedom, but freedom, equality, and fraternity, and, consequently, I also argue that his ideas are suggestive of a greatly expanded liberalism. As with liberalism, Frye also views Protestantism as a theory of personal liberty, more precisely Christian liberty. He views liberty as one of the goals of belief and vision, and so just as his dialectical thinking about education and work is suggestive of liberal theory, so his dialectical view of the Bible is suggestive of his Protestantism. But, as I explain, in his view the goal of belief and vision is not simply freedom but power, love, and wisdom, and so his ideas point to a Protestantism based on three interrelated values, paralleling his expanded liberalism. The Critical Background: The Dialectical Nature of Frye’s Theory of Literature The work on Frye that anticipates my study to the greatest extent is that of a small handful of commentators who at different times have attempted to give an account of the dialectical nature of Frye’s theory of literature. Even if these commentaries do not consider the political significance of the two halves of the dialectic of Frye’s literary theory, they foreshadow my own work. I shall proceed with a brief history of this scholarship as well as the background to it. In 1970 Frye published The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society, ‘a collection of essays and lectures, composed at intervals between 1962 and 1968’ (StS, vii). In the preface to the volume he explains the origin of both his title and his subtitle, and after having spoken of his title, he goes on to declare tersely: ‘And, as some of those who write about me are still asserting that I ignore the social reference of literary criticism, the sub-title calls the attention of those who read me to the fact that I have written about practically nothing else’ (StS, x). It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, more than to any other single critic, it is W.K. Wimsatt to whom Frye is responding with this statement. In his essay ‘Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth’ (1966) Wimsatt challenges Frye’s views on literature and criticism with reference to Anatomy of Criticism, the recently published The Educated Imagination (which Wimsatt sees as a ‘small-scale account of his system’), The Well-

Introduction

9

Tempered Critic, Fables of Identity, A Natural Perspective, and T.S. Eliot: An Introduction. (Fearful Symmetry is spoken of later in the essay, but plays little part in it.)6 In his essay Wimsatt pays homage to Frye’s ‘liveliness, … vivid wit and charm’ (Wimsatt, 84), and compares him to Oscar Wilde, but the essay represents a somewhat ill-tempered and rambling attack on Frye’s work. Undoubtedly, the most important section is an early one in which Wimsatt speaks of Plato’s Ion and chapter 9 of Aristotle’s Poetics, before going on to argue that Frye finds himself in the same situation as Aristotle and his modern day descendants – Coleridge, Croce, and Richards – in that he is bound to work within ‘a circle of paradox (or contradiction)’ (Wimsatt, 79) that is inseparable from literary theory: ‘I mean the double difficulty, of poetry in relation to the world, and that of criticism in relation to value – the so-far irreducible critical experiences: that literature is both more lively and less lifelike than the real world (this impossible pig of a world); that criticism cannot demonstrate value but is at the same time inescapably concerned with trying to do so’ (ibid.). On one level, Wimsatt is clearly indignant about what he views as Frye’s blithe denial of any connection between literature and ‘reality.’ What distinguishes Frye from his forebears, argues Wimsatt, is simply his self-confidence: ‘In his thinking on these problems Frye differs from other literary theorists mainly in the extreme assurance, the magisterial sweep and energy, with which he at moments attempts (or pretends) to detach literature from the world of reality, and criticism from evaluation, and in the aplomb with which he involves himself in the oddities, implausibilities, even the patent contradictions, required for this detachment’ (Wimsatt, 80). (It may be that in this section Wimsatt unintentionally recognizes features in Frye that delight some of us, and that he is responding negatively to the very kind of thinking which is dialectical.) Subsequently, critics sympathetic to Frye’s theory sought to clarify the social nature of his literary criticism. In his essay ‘Northrop Frye and the Necessary Hybrid: Criticism as Aesthetic Humanism’ (1971), Peter Cummings seeks to address what he sees as the antithesis at the heart of Frye’s work: Cummings maintains that ‘in Frye’s work the disinterested philosophy of aesthetic literary criticism and the socially conscious philosophy of humanistic criticism threaten to meet head-on as irresistible force and immovable object.’7 Criticism in Frye’s view is ‘a hybrid of two distinct and apparently antithetical mental attitudes’ (Cummings, 256). Cummings traces the development of this kind of

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thinking about criticism through Frye’s writings, from the emphasis on both ‘the dolce and the utile of literary experience’ (Cummings, 257) evident in Fearful Symmetry, to the ‘understanding of the necessity of both aesthetic and humanistic attitudes’ (Cummings, 258) manifest in Anatomy of Criticism. Similarly, in ‘Writing in Canada: Innis, McLuhan, and Frye: Frontiers of Canadian Criticism’ (1972), Jan Slan begins the section of his essay dedicated to Frye by declaring that we may well think The Critical Path is a ‘radical departure for a writer who had often been accused of being too schematic, too much of a purist and too little concerned with the “real issues of life,”’ but that this would be a mistake for his works are characterized by ‘an unwavering meditation on a theme which we can trace back to the first chapter of his study of William Blake,’ this theme being ‘that as human beings we participate simultaneously in two worlds, the one in which we find ourselves and the one in which we would like to live.’8 And Slan proceeds to make his way through the canon of Frye’s writings demonstrating that this concern is present in each of his works. Likewise, in ‘Frye and the Social Context of Criticism’ (1974), Robert Denham argues that those with misgivings about the social reference of Frye’s work are guilty of promulgating a ‘caricature’ which a close reading of Frye’s work is sufficient to dispel.9 ‘Even in the Anatomy,’ states Denham, ‘where Frye’s primary concern is the formal nature of literature, we see his willingness to confront such questions as the role of literature in society, the ethical ends of art, and the social function of criticism’ (Denham, 63). Setting the record straight, Denham argues, ‘It is clear from the “Tentative Conclusion” to the Anatomy that Frye neither endorses the view that criticism is finally autonomous nor accepts the idea that literature is aesthetically self-contained’ (Denham, 64), and he goes on to draw the reader’s attention to pertinent sections of the final essay. Denham identifies ‘two poles of reference in Frye’s explanation – ‘the imagination and society’ (ibid.) – and he gives an account of the importance of both: ‘Frye is unwilling to let either of them be his ultimate form. If society becomes the goal of criticism, then art becomes subservient to morality or to one of the practical sciences, and the detachment of the imaginative vision which Frye champions is lost … On the other hand, if the aesthetic norm is given priority, the social function of criticism withers’ (Denham, 64–5). And in the remainder of the essay Denham continues to trace Frye’s attempts to grapple with these conflicting impulses in his theory.

Introduction

11

In ‘Northrop Frye and the Defence of Imagination’ (1982), Deanne Bogdan argues that The Educated Imagination and the works that follow it are characterized by an ‘almost evangelical fervour about literary values and their importance to the preservation of civilization.’10 In other words, Frye’s work represents ‘one great apology for poetry … in the tradition of Sidney and Shelley’ (ibid.). ‘What has to be safeguarded,’ writes Bogdan, ‘is not poetry or literature as a form of morality or knowledge, but the kind of knowledge and morality of man to which poetic creation attests’ (Bogdan, 204). For Bogdan, every apology for poetry is a response to ‘the Platonic paradox, or Socratic dilemma,’ and engages with the simultaneous independence and referential nature of art (ibid.). In her view Frye is concerned with the ‘“intrinsic” and “extrinsic” value of poetry’ (Bogdan, 205): Frye also espouses both kinds of poetic value, but unlike Abrams he views them in terms of each other, not as two distinct critical activities. That the extrinsic value of literature resides in the intrinsic value is the basis of all Frye’s critical interests, and links his pleas for the autonomy of literature to his claims for its social value … We must be prepared to demonstrate how the principle of social responsibility is compatible with that of aesthetic detachment, how, in fact, the twin goals of instruction and delight can be effected without doing violence to each other. (ibid.)

Bogdan proceeds by summarizing Frye’s ideas on the social function of art, and then draws attention to the contradiction manifest in Frye’s beliefs about ‘literature’s extrinsic value’ and the fact that ‘he jealously guards the intrinsic value of literature’ (Bogdan, 208). Like both of the other critics we have considered, Bogdan acknowledges the patiencestretching nature of Frye’s thinking: Firstly, how can Frye at the same time espouse and reject a principle of aesthetic self-containment for literature? Secondly, how can he affirm its moral value while denying that the arts, of themselves, can transform life? (Bogdan, 209)

Bogdan attempts to find answers to these questions in her essay and towards the end of the essay speaks of a plane in Frye’s thought ‘where delight becomes instruction; integrity, seriousness; and intrinsic, one with extrinsic value’ (Bogdan, 212).

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The Necessary Unity of Opposites

In ‘Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth,’ Wimsatt had spoken of a ‘patent contradiction in Frye’s theory’: Thus, literature, on the one hand has no reference to life; it is autonomous, like mathematics, and sufficient to itself; it ‘takes over’ life, envelops and absorbs it, swallows it. Literature is made out of literature. At the same time literature does refer to life, it must; it began with real life in a primitive situation, and it is concerned with promoting values for real life, the vision of an ideal society … (Wimsatt, 80–1)

In contrast to Wimsatt, these other critics view the aesthetic and the social aspects of Frye’s criticism not as an infuriating inconsistency but as two equally important tendencies within his work. Far from undermining the social function of literature, Frye’s criticism is thoroughly bound up with the complex relation between literature and society. Such tensions must be understood in terms of a vital dialectic in Frye’s work. But in the last analysis these critics also fail to do justice to Frye’s theory of literature. Though they have uncovered the crucial tension in his literary theory, they stop short of a thorough exploration of its two dimensions that fleshes out the political implications of this theory, which is the task I have undertaken in chapter 4. At the close of his essay ‘Frye and Ideology,’ Imre Salusinszky wonders ‘whether Frye’s “middle way,” between determinism and aesthetic indeterminacy, may yet turn out to be the truly critical path’;11 my chapter 4 is an endorsement of the idea that Frye’s is a third way, but it is, I argue, a third way which is characterized by Blakean exuberance rather than ‘middle way’ accommodation or compromise. The Present Study and Cultural Wars As indicated, much of this study represents an examination of Frye’s secular thinking; his secular thinking is post-partisan, and for this reason a brief reflection upon the larger political backdrop against which Frye wrote may be useful at this early stage. The 1960s saw the rise of new trends in thinking which, taken together, would come to be spoken of as the New Left. Partly as a result of this development, a new conservatism was also to burgeon, although when the Watergate scandal broke, it halted the rise of the Right, and something of a ‘liberal’ renaissance was allowed to develop. American liberalism at this time, Kevin Phillips tells us, focused on the legalization of abortion, the issue of

Introduction

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school prayer, the drive to get the Equal Rights Amendment into the Constitution, the sexual revolution, and birth-control initiatives.12 From the conservative point of view, these developments served as a pretext for the era of Reaganism, which to an extent represented a straightforward rejection of much of that renaissance. While the Right secured a firm grip on the reigns of power in the early 1980s, the Left went on to develop its own new version of cultural radicalism, championing ‘diversity, multiculturalism, and constructivism’ in the universities.13 The decade came to be characterized by a new bipolar climate: The 1980s is a moment that calls for a dialectical interpretation: it was a period of identity-oriented withdrawal and theoretical extremism in response to American nationalism and a new expansion of the free market. While Ronald Reagan and his minions insisted that ‘America is back,’ the nation’s sociocultural fabric decomposed into as many little blocks as there were identity-based microgroups.14

The result of this is that in the view of many commentators the United States is experiencing ‘culture wars,’ the phenomenon anatomized in James Davidson Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle To Define America (1991). In his book Hunter argues that the United States is a bitterly contested terrain, where two elites, both of which contain a variety of types of influential people, are vying for control of American public life. In Hunter’s view ‘the cleavages at the heart of the contemporary culture war’ have been generated by ‘the impulse toward orthodoxy and the impulse toward progressivism.’15 The orthodox include both the religiously oriented and the secular: the former may operate within the traditional Christian framework, but the latter appeal to Natural Law. The numbers of the orthodox are made up of ‘traditional intellectuals,’ who see themselves as the guardians of heritage; the progressivists are ‘organic intellectuals,’ a new vanguard who prize a break with the past for an improved future (ibid.). A strict opposition of conservative and radical, however, does not help us to understand Frye’s work. Crucially, it seems to invite the conclusion that Frye is a cultural conservative, but, needless to say, it is a mistake to characterize him in this way. He has a very different agenda from the cultural radicals; similarly, he knows all about the pitfalls of a reactionary or conservative response to a situation of change. He witnessed the rise of the so-called ‘New Left’ and the initial conservative response to it, and as early as 1976 he was ready to say that the mood had changed

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to such an extent that a new conservatism was on the rise. Interestingly, his commentary clearly indicates that he occupied a position free of the to-ings and fro-ings of political thinking about culture: It would be easy to take a complacent attitude to the relative quiet of today and say that the pendulum has swung back. It has, but we should look at the whole metaphor: when a pendulum swings back it is always later in time. Besides, if a radical reaction includes a good deal of hysteria, a conservative one is bound to include a good deal of inertia. (WE, 489)

Frye is a near-contemporary of those on the cultural Left, but, as I argue in this study, he is a thinker who belongs to an older generation, and his roots are in a time when it was possible to look back to earlier competing left-wing and right-wing ideas about culture and move decisively beyond them without merely setting out on another partisan course. He demands of us that we acknowledge that though the history of ideas seems to be characterized by competing left-wing and right-wing conceptions of culture, his own thinking represents something different. Throughout my study I have the luxury of being able to draw on a vast oeuvre in which the main ideas remain unchanged. Of course, the repetitive element in Frye’s work troubled him, and as early as The Stubborn Structure Frye had started to offer a commentary on the element of repetition in his work. ‘I have tried to minimize all repetition, and hope that what remains will be more helpful than distracting. Sometimes, of course, repetition can be a sign not so much of a lack of ideas as of conviction, even of some consistency in one’s convictions’ (StS, viii). However, the consistency of his thought means that one can confidently speak of Frye’s view or position within a number of contexts, and that there is always ample support for one’s argument. In connection with this, one striking characteristic of Frye’s writings is their occasional nature, numerous books and essays being based on lectures and talks. This characteristic ties in with another related facet: the accessible nature of his writings. Of course, Frye’s writings are not only accessible from the point of view of the academy. The Educated Imagination, a text which is pivotal in what follows, especially chapter 4, started as a series of radio talks for the CBC. The Double Vision, a key text in chapter 7, is testimony to Frye’s stylistic range as well, fulfilling a role similar to that of The Educated Imagination within the context of com-

Introduction

15

mentary on the Bible. One of Frye’s guiding principles is that the lay person should be able to engage with his ideas. This is not simply populism. It descends from his sense that educationalists operate in relation to the genuine needs of a social group, and that a democratic, bottomup paradigm is needed if the problems of education are to be solved. In his Introduction to Words with Power Frye offers a polemical commentary on these interrelated factors, and takes on ingrained complacency within academia: There are two reasons for this ‘public address’ format. One is the conviction that radically new directions in the humanities can come only from the cultural needs of this lay public and not from any one version of critical theory, including my own so far as I have one. The other is that books appear from time to time telling us that the educational establishment in our society has betrayed our cultural heritage and allowed young people to grow up barbarously ignorant of its traditions. Such books are often warmly received, with everyone apparently convinced that something should be done. Nothing is done, mainly because the only implicit recommendation for action is to prod the educational bureaucracy. I think this starts at the wrong end, besides introducing assumptions in the philosophy of education that may be mistaken and are in any case unnecessary. Surely a constant awareness of the widest possible audience for scholarship in the humanities can start the educational breakthrough that everyone seems agreed is needed. (WP, 13–14)

Needless to say, on no occasion does Frye ‘dumb down’ his argument. His very approach, then, would seem to be suggestive of a dialectic where an insistence on communicating with as large an audience as possible and an uncompromising union of secular and Biblical cultures are successfully combined with one another. Throughout my study I shall draw on the whole range of Frye’s writings, happily making use of those writings where the public address format is clear, thus foregrounding Frye’s social commitment on this level, too. And, given that I quote liberally from Frye, it is my hope that my own account of Frye may be rendered a thoroughly accessible one in the process.

2 Mandarin and Rebel: Frye’s Secular Dialectical Thinking

For Frye one of the most striking facts about modern literature is that the social attitudes of modern writers are fundamentally antisocial. In one section of Words with Power he charts the development of such attitudes from Diderot onwards. ‘An attitude of defiance as well as of self-doubt or submissiveness runs through all literature,’ he observes, but in the past two centuries literature has been characterized by an especially pronounced ‘anti-establishment’ outlook: Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau in the eighteenth century heralds a world in which practically every decade has thrown up some variety of anti-establishment attitude associated with the arts. These include the Bohemians of the late nineteenth century and the Dadaists of the time of the First World War. Contemporary with the latter, many great writers, along with minor ones, flirted with various types of fascism, evidently because that was the most obviously antisocial ideology within reach. In English literature they include Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D.H. Lawrence (whose Plumed Serpent is surely proto-Nazi in its implications). What seem in retrospect to be milder if no less perverse ideologies affected many others in the same period, and a tendency to simplistic obscurantism, whether located on the left or the right, extends both earlier, in the work of some very prominent nineteenth-century novelists, and later in the subcultural and countercultural movements of the last quarter-century. (WP, 50)

In The Modern Century he conducts a brief survey of different groupings of modern writers, attempting to provide a rough guide to their social

Mandarin and Rebel 17

attitudes: he speaks of the ‘anarchism’ of modern American literature; another group represents something of a ‘Freudian proletariat movement’ (NFMC, 44); writers such as Eliot, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and others, make up an ‘elite or neo-aristocracy’ (NFMC, 45); lastly, Frye considers ‘the contemporary artist as criminal’ phenomenon. Summing up, he comments: ‘All these antisocial attitudes in modern culture are, broadly speaking, reactionary. That is, their sense of antagonism to existing society is what is primary’ (NFMC, 48). Frye provides another suggestive context in the First Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, where he discusses the politics of the writers of the early twentieth century, his own near-contemporaries, in terms of a return to the ‘high mimetic mode,’ which is associated with the Renaissance period in Frye’s thought. ‘There may be noticed a general tendency to react most strongly against the mode immediately preceding, and, to a lesser extent, to return to some of the standards of the modal grandfather’ (AC, 59). The latter consideration leads him to comment on the reappearance of high mimetic standards in twentieth-century literature, and it is this factor which from one point of view determines the political disposition of its writers: In the new mode the fondness for the small closely-knit group, the sense of the esoteric, and the nostalgia for the aristocratic that has produced such very different phenomena as the royalism of Eliot, the fascism of Pound, and the cult of chivalry in Yeats, are all in a way part of the reversion to high mimetic standards. The sense of the poet as courtier, of poetry as the service of a prince, of the supreme importance of the symposium or elite group, are among the high mimetic conceptions reflected in twentieth-century literature, especially in the poetry of the symboliste tradition from Mallarmé to George and Rilke. (ibid.)

Quite clearly, the political standpoint of Frye’s own thought contrasts sharply with that of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and other modernist writers. But while Frye would repeatedly define himself through opposition to the ideological outlooks of these writers, a lurch to the Left, in his view, is every bit as undesirable as a shift to the Right. The history of the past two centuries tells the story of Left versus Right, the apotheosis of the conflict being the twentieth-century Cold War. Similarly, since this political spectrum was established, Left and Right have also developed contrasting views on cultural questions, and one can identify all manner of left-wing and right-wing attitudes to culture. (Left and Right are broad-

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brush categories and the actual history of the last two centuries exhibits a great deal of merging and crossovers, but the readiness of artists, as well as critics, to take on a distinct political identity is quite striking.) Frye sees all such attitudes to culture – twentieth-century attitudes included – as part of the wheel of history, subject to rises and falls in their fortunes. In one period, one political view and attitude to culture rises to a position of ascendancy while the popularity of the opposite outlook wanes, only for the relation to be reversed by the next turn of the cycle. But Frye is suspicious of all such political allegiances on the part of cultural figures. The Exceptionalism of Frye What is most striking about Frye is that his own cultural and political thinking is testimony to his successful avoidance of such political dead ends, and it is the influence of Blake which lies behind Frye’s outlook. While Frye stands out from his contemporaries on account of their political convictions, he repeatedly identifies with Blake in his writings, suggesting that his avoidance of reactionary politics was due to Blake’s influence. On numerous occasions he comments on the fact that that it was Blake who helped him to resist the temptation of ideologies in the early twentieth century, at a time when major writers were succumbing to such political narratives. In his revealing interviews with Frye, David Cayley invited Frye to speak of this early encounter with Blake: cayley: With your interest in myth and symbol, you entered early on into a kind of magical territory where a lot of people seem to have turned wrong politically. Yeats and Pound and Eliot, in their different ways, would all be examples, but you seem to have always kept your head. frye: Well, it was Blake who helped me to keep my head. One of the books I picked up was Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, which was a big Nazi polemic claiming that the racially pure come from Atlantis and so forth. Having been concentrating on Blake so heavily, I could see that this was the devil’s parody of Blake. I think Yeats plunged into something rather similar without realizing that it was the devil’s parody of Blake, although Yeats knew Blake. (INF, 934)

And in ‘The Search For Acceptable Words,’ an essay first published in 1973 and later reprinted in Spiritus Mundi, Frye provides an autobiographical account of the beginning of his interest in Blake. For Frye

Mandarin and Rebel 19

the early part of the twentieth-century saw a multi-faceted challenge to the tenets of Anglo-Saxon culture. As we shall see, Frye identified himself as a democrat, associating democracy with Great Britain, France, and, most importantly, the United States and Canada. And, in connection with his political views, he viewed English literature as ‘Romantic, revolutionary, and Protestant’ (FI, 1). If there was no need to defend Anglo-Saxon culture at first, Frye explains, the situation changed when totalitarianism started to loom over Europe, and the so-called treason of the clerks began. (Eliot bears the brunt of Frye’s polemic.) Under these conditions, Blake’s represented a reliable and sane guiding voice: 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 Anglo-Catholic in religion was all part of the game. But the feeling of personal outrage and betrayal that I felt when I opened After Strange Gods was something else again. 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. (CPCT, 319–20)

But what is the specific nature of Blake’s influence on Frye? It is specifically Blake’s dialectical thinking which Frye seizes upon and which helps him to avoid the errors of judgment of his contemporaries. In Frye’s view the approaches of Eliot et al. to culture are partisan because they are undialectical. Crucially, Frye’s own secular thinking, inspired by Blake’s conceptions of Orc, Urizen, and Los, is dialectical and thereby post-partisan. On one level of meaning, Orc and Urizen represent radical and conservative attitudes respectively. In ‘Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype,’ Frye expertly describes the figures of Orc and Urizen, tying

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the former in with passion, dream, and the pleasure principle, and the latter in with law, conscience, and the principle of reality: The world of law, stretching from the starry heavens to the moral conscience, is the domain of Urizen in Blake’s symbolism. It sits on a volcano in which the rebellious Titan Orc, the spirit of passion, lies bound, writhing and struggling to get free. Each of these spirits is Satanic or devilish to the other. While we dream, Urizen, the principle of reality, is the censor, or, as Blake calls him, the accuser, a smug and grinning hypocrite, an impotent old man, the caricature that the child in us makes out of the adult world that thwarts him. But as long as we are awake, Orc, the lawless pleasure principle, is an evil dragon bound under the conscious world in chains, and we all hope he will stay there. (M&B, 191)

Blake’s thinking is sensitive to the cyclical nature of human history. A lurch to the Left, or rise of Orc, always presages an immanent return to the Urizenic thinking of the political Right: Revolution attracts sympathy more because it is revolution than because of what it proposes to substitute; this is concerned with the fact that we indulge the young more than the old because they are young and not because they are right. But as Orc stiffens into Urizen, it becomes manifest that the world is so constituted that no cause can triumph within it and still preserve its imaginative integrity. (FS, 218)

And just as the French Revolution is the archetypal ‘revolution,’ the Reign of Terror is the archetypal example of Orc stiffening into Urizen. One could be forgiven for thinking that Blake’s own thought simply provides us with a framework for these alternating and contrasting leftwing and right-wing outlooks, but this seemingly unending cycle is broken by a third factor. The third factor introduced by Blake, which is bound up with apocalypse, is his character Los, symbolizing work in society: Plainly, we cannot settle the conflict of Orc and Urizen by siding with one against the other, still less by pretending that either of them is an illusion. We must look for a third factor in human life, one which meets the requirements of both the dream and the reality. This third factor, called Los by Blake, might provisionally be called work, or constructive activity. (M&B, 191–2)

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The worlds of Orc and Urizen stand in dialectical opposition to one another, but the world of Los, which is Eden, represents an alternative on a higher level, which can be thought of as dialectical, suprahistorical, and, given what I have said about the political connotations of Orc and Urizen, post-partisan. Work, argues Frye, realizes in experience ‘the child’s and the dreamer’s worlds,’ thereby evincing ‘what there is about each that is genuinely innocent’ (M&B, 192). Clearly, he has in mind the work which is genuinely fruitful, the polar opposite of ‘perverted or wasted work, ruins and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly’ (AC, 136). Lying beneath Generation, which is the ordinary level of human experience, Blake’s world of Ulro represents ‘the world as it is when no work is being done, the world where dreams are impotent and waking life haphazard’ (M&B, 192, 195). Eden, however, is the result of ‘work, or constructive activity,’ symbolized by Los: it is ‘the world of apocalypse in which innocence and experience have become the same thing’ (M&B, 194). Frye’s explanation of Blake’s thinking is profoundly emblematic of the structure of his own secular dialectical thinking. As I endeavour to show, in each area of secular enquiry Frye dialectically moves beyond the level of historical oppositions to a third set of ideas, an alternative on a higher level of understanding which may be said to represent a suprahistorical alternative. On this new level seemingly antithetical modes of thought prove to be complementary, and the values they promote – beauty or ‘truth,’ leisure or work, liberty or equality – are shown to be of a necessity unities rather than dichotomies, just as dream and reality, and innocence and experience are in Blake’s thought. Frye’s dialectical thinking within this context is post-partisan, belonging to a world beyond the leftwing and right-wing ideas of the ordinary history of ideas, just as Los and the apocalyptic world associated with him are suggestive of a world above nature and human history, symbolized by Orc and Urizen. Hegel and Blake I have distinguished sharply between Blakean and Hegelian dialectical thinking, even though the consideration of the extent to which Blakean thought itself can be viewed as ‘Hegelian’ is a staple in Blake studies. In Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic, Lorraine Clark provides a useful commentary on the Blake scholars’ attempts to determine whether or not Blake may be considered Hegelian.1 (‘Northrop Frye,’ she argues, ‘is generally credited with initiating the “systematic” (Hegelian) reading of Blake’ [Clark, 203].) She proceeds by citing a num-

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ber of scholars who argue that Blake is not a Hegelian before arriving at her own conclusion, which is dialectical in itself: ‘[Blake] is both Hegelian and anti-Hegelian’ (Clark, 6). Moreover, Frye speaks of Hegelian thought in later works. If one’s thinking is to rise above the level of entrenched positions one must think dialectically, he points out in Words with Power, and it is Hegel whom he identifies as the first apologist of this kind of dialectical thinking: Increasingly, since Hegel at least, we have come to see how every affirmation is a partial statement containing its own opposite, which remains attached to that affirmation. If we say ‘There is a God,’ we have suggested the possibility of saying ‘There is no God,’ and so in a sense have already said it. (WP, 48)

And in The Great Code Frye provides us with a fascinating insight into his understanding of the conception of Hegelian dialectic, which again testifies to his interest in Hegel. He begins by discussing Dante’s conception of polysemous meaning before proceeding to Hegel, arguing that polysemous meaning is ‘the development of a single dialectical process, like the dialectical process described in Hegel’s Phenomenology’ (GC, 243). In the crucial following section Frye provides us with an account of Hegelian dialectic: What Hegel means by dialectic is not anything reducible to a patented formula, like the ‘thesis–antithesis–synthesis’ one so often attached to him, nor can it be anything predictive. It is a much more complex operation of a form of understanding combining with its own otherness or opposite, in a way that negates itself and yet passes through that negation into a new stage, preserving its essence in a broader context, and abandoning the one just completed like the chrysalis of a butterfly or a crustacean’s outgrown shell. (ibid.)

However, the kind of dialectical thinking Frye inherits from Blake, which some might regard as ‘Hegelian,’ is to be viewed as distinctly Blakean in this study. Frye’s expert articulation of Blake’s dialectical thinking reveals it to be a kind of thinking which involves a neat interplay between interrelated characters (Orc, Urizen, and Los), places (Beulah or the world of innocence, Generation or the world of law, and Eden) and ideas (innocence or dream, experience or reality, and the unity of innocence and experience in Eden), which distinguishes it quite thor-

Mandarin and Rebel 23

oughly from Hegel. (This interplay of ideas will be explained in chapter 3 in connection with Frye’s dialectical criticism of Blake.) Conclusion Frye’s secular thinking is dialectical and suprahistorical, but also postpartisan, being inspired by Blake’s conception of Eden, the apocalyptic world, opposed to Generation and Beulah, and Los, opposed to Orc and Urizen. In his biography of Frye, John Ayre hits upon an image which encapsulates these factors brilliantly. He speaks of ‘the two contending sides of Frye: the rebel and the mandarin’ (Ayre, 180). And in an interview with Frye, David Cayley picks up on this image, and Frye endorses it to a significant degree: cayley: Your biographer John Ayre sees you, I think, as a mandarin and a rebel in one skin. Is there anything to this? frye: There could be. In certain types of society, including, I should think, most of classical China, the mandarin could not be a rebel. The principles of Confucianism wouldn’t allow it. I think it is possible to be both, up to a point. cayley: And you’ve tried it? frye: Up to a point I’ve tried it, yes. (INF, 971)

The following chapters endeavour to throw light on Frye’s secular thinking. In chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 I shall discuss Frye’s secular dialectical thinking with its post-partisan stance, endeavouring to bring out a ‘third factor’ in intellectual history, which might be thought of as the Blakean option.

3 Beauty and Truth I: Frye’s Theory of Blake’s Poetry

In his bibliography of Blake scholarship, Frye discusses Swinburne’s contribution to the field. Swinburne, argues Frye, is responsible for promulgating the notion that Blake is best viewed as something of an aesthete: Swinburne’s brilliant and generous essay, William Blake, appeared in 1868 as a critical pendant to the Gilchrist life, and established Blake once for all as an important poet. The virtues of this essay speak eloquently for themselves; its limitations are unfortunately the main concern of the historian of Blake scholarship, however ungrateful the task. In the first place, Swinburne, on the authority less of Gilchrist than of his own temperament, strongly emphasized the social isolation of Blake, and passed over Blake’s radical, even revolutionary, political views, dismissing The French Revolution, for instance, as ‘mere wind and splutter.’ The stereotype that he took from Gilchrist was rather that of the rebellion of the artist against society, and it was this aspect of Blake that was stressed in later Victorian criticism of him. Blake thus became a prophet of the aesthetic radicals, whose enemies were the Philistine and the Puritan rather than the tyrant and the usurer. Yeats, for instance, speaks of Blake as having begun the practice of ‘preaching against the Philistine.’ (M&B, 274)

‘The two fine essays of Yeats in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903),’ Frye continues, ‘did much to establish Blake as a prophet of English symbolisme’ (M&B, 274–5). Arthur Symons’s William Blake (1907) ‘gives us a less

Beauty and Truth I 25

sadistic but even more aesthetic Blake than Swinburne’s, a Blake whose defence of the more energetic virtues was now seen to have affinities with the Herrenmoral of Nietzsche’ (M&B, 275). Whatever the merits of these critical endeavours, for Frye they are characterized by one striking weakness: they fail to discuss the social function of Blake’s poetry. And in his view this would have meant that these critical responses were crucially flawed. In the same bibliography Frye cites a diametrically opposed reading of Blake when he goes on to speak of a study of Blake published in the same year as Symons’s which aspires to serve as a corrective to the aesthetic view: Pierre Berger produced William Blake, mysticisme et poésie, translated by D.H. Conner as William Blake: Poet and Mystic (1914). Berger’s book was among other things the first really thoughtful and systematic study yet made of the prophetic books. It demonstrated a coherent and controlling mind at work in them; the commentary provides much new and specific information about Blake’s meaning – something that Swinburne and Symons hardly provide at all outside The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – and it marks the beginning of the critical effort to clear up these poems for the common reader. Also, as one might have expected from his nationality, Berger’s view of The French Revolution, and of the political and social reference of Blake’s outlook generally, was better balanced than Swinburne’s. (ibid.)

With Berger’s book we can correlate, from a much later period of Blake studies, David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times.1 In his Blake bibliography Frye speaks of Erdman’s skilful exposition of ‘the social reference of Blake’s poetry’: The book is based on a clear and accurate reading of the whole of Blake’s poetry, including the Prophecies, besides keeping in view the total range of his work as illustrator and engraver, which often throws unexpected light on the symbolism. Many traditional errors and vague notions, parroted from one writer to another, are corrected or cleared up, and an exhaustive program of research not only explains an extraordinary number of obscure points and problems, but builds up a logical biographical narrative as it goes on. (M&B, 284–5)

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Frye was clear about the importance of Erdman’s study. He praises it in his original review for much the same reasons as he lauds it in the bibliography: ‘There have been several studies of Blake’s social and political interests and of his awareness of, and involvement with, the historical events of his time. Mr Erdman’s book, however, is the first in this tradition to employ consistently a full knowledge of the meaning of Blake’s Prophecies and an ability to recognize the historical allusions made in them’ (M&B, 237). He is most complimentary on the subject of Erdman’s attention to the visual aspect of Blake’s canon: ‘The paintings and engravings are studied with a thoroughness unique in Blake commentary …’ (M&B, 238). And he concludes with a minor criticism of the volume but also an endorsement of it: ‘In its totality the book may, perhaps, be criticized as exaggerating Blake’s domestic radicalism and underestimating his hatred and distrust of what he called ‘deism,’ which made him dislike French imperialism quite as much as the English variety. But the host of new facts and the clarification of both text and context which Mr Erdman’s study has brought are of value quite independent of this’ (ibid.). Indeed, we learn from the preface to Erdman’s study that Frye, along with Howard O. Brogan, read ‘various drafts’ (Erdman, ix) of the manuscript. However, Frye must have held similarly important reservations about Erdman’s Blake criticism, for, like Berger’s, Erdman’s focus on Blake’s ‘social and political interests’ points to a failure to consider Blake’s poetry as artistic creation. Blake criticism which tackles the meaning of Blake’s poetry for the ‘common reader’ and also fleshes out the social reference of Blake’s works is in Frye’s opinion evidently an important corrective to the tradition initiated by Swinburne. However, the tendency to ignore the aesthetic identity of Blake’s work when attending to the social context means that Berger’s work is as one-sided and partial as the practical criticism on Blake it seeks to correct. These studies, then, are undoubtedly of considerable value, but it is equally clear that for Frye they allow for only a partial understanding of Blake’s poetry. The Swinburne-SymonsYeats’ response is bereft of a proper conception of the social function of Blake’s poetry; at the same time, any commentary on Blake’s poetry which stresses exclusively the social context of the poetry fails to acknowledge the imaginative nature of Blake’s poetry. One might describe the two values which structure this opposition as beauty and ‘truth.’ The kinds of Blake criticism viewed sceptically by Frye can be said to represent criticism concerned with either beauty or ‘truth’; or, bet-

Beauty and Truth I 27

ter, beauty without poetic ‘truth,’ on the one hand, and ‘truth’ without beauty, on the other. In contrast to these, Frye’s own criticism of Blake’s poetry addresses the fact that, as one attempts to do justice to one dimension of Blake’s poetry, one is in danger of demoting the significance of another. His Blake criticism, as we shall see, represents an attempt to produce a dialetical response to Blake’s poetry which is free from the shortcomings of both approaches, an overall account of Blake in which both the social reference and the aesthetic qualities are acknowledged, and the beauty and poetic ‘truth’ of Blake’s poetry are clarified. The two opposing tendencies Frye considers are suggestive of different political sensibilities. The tradition of Blake criticism advanced by Swinburne and Symons is suggestive of a conservatism of aesthetic quietism, owing to its failure to address Blake’s radical politics. (Swinburne as an aristocratic republican, not to mention a flouter of much Victorian convention, might seem an odd figure to class as a conservative. His aestheticism, however, places him in the ‘cultural conservative’ grouping.) Erdman’s work on Blake represents a radical approach to the same subject on account of his consideration of the social function of Blake’s work, the very dimension that Swinburne and others ignore. Taken together, the two approaches are suggestive of something of a historical cycle characterized by two contrasting political associations. In contrast to this, Frye’s dialectical and post-partisan view of Blake, as we shall see, transcends the historical cycle, thereby eschewing conventional political affiliations. ‘Blake,’ Frye explains, ‘thinks almost entirely in terms of two narrative structures’ (M&B, 199). The story of the conflict of Orc and Urizen is the first of these. ‘The other,’ he states, ‘is the comic vision of the apocalypse or work of Los, the clarification of the mind which enables one to grasp the human form of the world’ (ibid.). He goes on to claim that this second dimension of Blake’s poetry is ‘not concerned with temporal sequence and is consequently not so much a real narrative as a dialectic’ (ibid.). (In Anatomy of Criticism he speaks of the mythos, or narrative, and the dianoia, or meaning, of a poem [AC, 67], and it is this distinction that he is alluding to in this passage.) In the main body of this chapter I shall throw light on Frye’s theory of Blake in two separate discussions of Blakean narrative and meaning, beginning with a consideration of narrative and meaning of his poetry as aesthetic and therefore conservative.

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The Narrative and Meaning of Blake’s Poetry In the opening section of the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, ‘Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,’ Frye distinguishes between ‘structural’ and ‘representational’ aspects of the arts (AC, 121–30). Within the context of painting he sets up an opposition between ‘extreme realism’ and ‘non-objective painting’ (AC, 121), and when he turns to literature he distinguishes between ‘representation or “lifelikeness”’ (AC, 124), ‘extreme “realism” or representative likeness to life’ (ibid.), and ‘verisimilitude’ (AC, 125), on the one hand, and ‘creation for its own sake’ (AC, 124), the ‘abstract and conventionalized’ (AC, 124) and ‘stylization’ (AC, 124, 125), on the other. ‘Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other (AC, 126). The distinction is suggestive of the opposition between the socially oriented and the aesthetic, and, for Frye, Blake’s poetry is in part aesthetic in this sense: it is mythical, pure form or structure, its emphasis being on narrative as design. Blake’s poetry is focused on the figure of Orc, a Blakean ‘Giant Form’ or mythical character who, amongst other things, represents revolutionary energy in history, and much of Frye’s commentary on Blake consists of the clarification of the Orc narrative. Orc’s story is bound up with the worlds of innocence and experience. Oppositions such as ‘success and decline, effort and repose, life and death’ (AC, 147), Frye explains, point to the fact that we think in terms of a top half of the natural cycle and a bottom half. The top half is ‘the world of romance and the analogy of innocence’; the bottom ‘the world of “realism” and the analogy of experience’ (AC, 150). The Orc narrative is a story which begins in the world of experience and continues in the world of innocence, before returning to the world of experience, where the story began. If its central character rises into the world of innocence, its resolution is bound up with the world of satire and irony, meaning that it is characterized by the downward movement from innocence to experience, which Frye thinks of as a tragic movement. This narrative is ‘the narrative of history, the cycle of law and war’ (M&B, 199). As such, ‘[it] has no end and no point and may be called the tragic or historical vision of life’ (ibid.). Structurally, the story of Orc is an ‘inverted-U or negative cycle’ (NFR, 16), like Biblical Weltgeschichte. Frye provides us with the following summation of Orc’s rise and fall:

Beauty and Truth I 29 Orc is first shown us, in the Preludium to America, as the libido of the dream, a boy lusting for a dim maternal figure and bitterly hating an old man who keeps him in chains. Then we see him as the conquering hero of romance, killing dragons and sea monsters, ridding the barren land of its impotent aged kings, freeing imprisoned women, and giving new hope to men. Finally we see him subside into the world of darkness again from whence he emerged, as the world of law slowly recovers its balance. (M&B, 200)

A number of chapters are dedicated to the Orc cycle in Fearful Symmetry, and Frye identifies his account of ‘Blake’s Orc symbolism in Fearful Symmetry (1947), chap. 7’ (AC, 399n. 87) as his first attempt to outline the ‘central unifying myth’ (AC, 179) of literature. In ‘The Archetypes of Literature’ (1951), his next articulation of the ‘central myth’ (EICT, 476), the myth begins with romance, moves on to comedy, before tragedy and, finally, satire and irony (EICT, 130–1). The Orc cycle, we note in passing, going from the world of satire and irony to romance and then back again to satire and irony, represents a foreshortened version of this rendering of the central myth described in ‘The Archetypes of Literature.’ (In an aside in chapter 3, I shall shed light on how Frye later altered his conception of the central myth of literature.) At first glance, then, Frye views Blakean narrative as purely mythical and therefore apparently detached from its social context. With respect to meaning, Frye’s argument about Blake’s poetry is, in the first analysis at least, equally aesthetic. Blake is a Christian poet, and the dianoia of his poetry comprises structures of imagery which represent worlds at the top and bottom of the cosmos, Eden and Ulro, Blake’s heaven and hell respectively. Metaphor is the organizing principle of Eden and Ulro and involves two distinct but related types of ‘identity’: the identity of each individual with its class, and the identity of each category of reality with each of the others. The identity of each individual with its class is identity as. The identity of each category of reality with each of the others is identity with: The commonsense view perceives separation and similarity; the imaginative view perceives two kinds of identity. Blake speaks of ‘Identities or Things’ [K470/E656]: a thing may be identified as itself, yet it cannot be identified except as an individual of a class. The class is its ‘living form,’ not its abstract essence, and form in Blake is a synonym for image, or

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experienced reality (thus the ‘Forms Eternal’ of M, 35.38 [32.38] are opposed to what Blake thought of as Platonic forms). All Blake’s images and mythical figures are ‘minute particulars’ or individuals identified with their total forms. Hence they are ‘States, Combinations of Individuals’ (M, 35.10 [32.10]), and can be seen in either singular or collective aspects. Ololon is the sixfold emanation of Milton because Milton had three wives and three daughters, yet also a mighty host descending to the earth and a single virgin in Blake’s garden. Blake refers impartially to Ololon as ‘she’ or ‘they.’ Further, all things are identical with each other. A man feels identical with himself at the age of seven, although between the man and the child there is little that is similar in regard to form, matter, time, space, or personality. And as in the imaginative view all things are within the life of a single eternal and infinite God-Man, all aspects, forms, or images of that body are identical. (M&B, 244–5)2

In total Frye thinks in terms of seven categories of reality in relation to Eden and Ulro: the divine, fiery, human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and watery. Within the context of Eden, metaphor identifies the individual of each class as its society, and so the one god is metaphorically all gods, the one man all men, and so on. While such identifications are typical of Eden, we come across them within the context of Ulro, too, for ‘natural religion, being a parody of real religion, often develops a set of individual symbols corresponding to the lamb, the tree of life, the glowing stone, and the rest’ (M&B, 198). If the ‘human form of the community is Christ, the God who is one Man,’ the ‘human form of tyranny is the isolated hero or inscrutable leader with his back to an aggregate of followers, or the priest of a veiled temple with an imaginary sky-god supposed to be behind the veil’ (M&B, 198–9): Against the tree of life we have what Blake calls the tree of mystery, the barren fig tree, the dead tree of the cross, Adam’s tree of knowledge, with its forbidden fruit corresponding to the fruits of healing on the tree of life. Against the fiery precious stone, the bodily form in which John saw God ‘like a jasper and a sardine stone’ [Revelation 4:3], we have the furnace, the prison of heat without light which is the form of the opaque warm-blooded body in the world of frustration, or the stone of Druidical sacrifice like the one that Hardy associates with Tess. Against the animal body of the lamb, we have the figure that Blake calls, after Ezekiel, the Covering Cherub, who represents a great many things, the unreal world of gods, human tyranny

Beauty and Truth I 31 and exploitation, and the remoteness of the sky, but whose animal form is that of the serpent or dragon wrapped around the forbidden tree. The dragon, being both monstrous and fictitious, is the best animal representative of the bogies inspired by human inertia: the Book of Revelation calls it ‘the beast that was, and is not, and yet is’ [17:8]. (M&B, 199)

Further, as metaphor identifies each category of reality with each of the other categories of reality, the vegetable world, for example, is identified with the animal world. ‘All trees in the garden are One Tree of Life,’ Frye explains; ‘all plants on the farm are a single harvest and vintage, the bread and wine of which are identical with the body and blood of the One Lamb of the animal world’ (M&B, 247). In addition to specific identifications between, for example, the animal and vegetable worlds, all the categories of reality are brought into metaphorical identification in Jesus, ‘the unifying principle which identifies all these images with one another’ (ibid.): Jesus is God and Man; he is the bread and wine, the body and blood, the tree, bread and water of life, the vine of which we are branches, the cornerstone of the city, and his body is the temple. (ibid.)

And just as in Eden the categories of reality are identical with one another, the bread and the wine, for example, being identical with the body and blood of the One Lamb of the animal world, so, in the spirit of parody, ‘All demonic images may be also identified with one another’: The entire universe of nature is the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of a cyclical labyrinth (M, 14. 43 [13.43]), and this universe is, in relation to the real world, both underground and (adopting the deluge version of the Fall) underwater. It is an embryonic world, described by Blake as the Mundane Shell (M, 19.21 ff. [17.21 ff.]), and within it is the vast interrelated mass of spawning generative life which Blake calls the ‘Polypus’ and identifies with Orc or Luvah, the natural body of which we are members (M, 31.31[29.31]; M, 38.24 [34.24]). The Covering Cherub may be seen in the stars who mark the circumference of the single vision, for Satan is above all a sky-god or lord of the natural heaven, a dragon whose tail drew down a third of the stars (M, 13.26 [12.26]). As his journey in Paradise Lost shows, his empire extends over both chaos and what we call the cosmos. As Leviathan, Satan is not only a sea-monster but the sea itself, the sea that covers Atlantis,

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Figure 1

All gods are One God. (The four Zoas are the spiritual body of the Word.)

All spirits or angels are One Spirit. (The Seven Eyes of God.)

All men are One Man.

ANIMAL WORLD

(Bride and Bridegroom as one flesh.)

All animals are a single sheepfold and all sheep One Lamb.

VEGETABLE WORLD

HUMAN WORLD

SPIRITUAL WORLD

DIVINE WORLD

EDEN

‘The vegetable world is a world in which all plants are a garden or farm, the Eden and Promised Land of the Bible. All trees in the garden are One Tree of Life; all plants on the farm are a single harvest and vintage, the bread and wine of which are identical with the body and blood of the One Lamb of the animal world’ (M&B, 247).

ULRO ‘Gods are conceived, on the analogy of the demonic human society, as inscrutable tyrants, jealous of their privileges … One of them is usually in supreme control, asserting that he is “God alone” and that “There is no other” (M, 9.25–6)’ (M&B, 249). ‘A society of self-righteous demons, who take possession of man to destroy him … As the true spirits are all One Spirit or tongue of flame, so evil spirits are all one “False Tongue,” or Satan as accuser of sin (M, 2.10; cf. James 3:6). This false tongue is called by Blake the “Covering Cherub,” who is to Satan what the Holy Spirit is to Jesus …’ (M&B, 249). ‘A society of tyrants and victims, with a supreme tyrant usually in control … The individual in such a society is a Selfhood who creates the cruel and lazy sky-gods in his own image. Corresponding to the Bride, the demonic vision has a harlot, the Whore of Babylon whose name is Mystery, the opposite of revelation or apocalypse’ (M&B, 249). ‘A society of tyrants and victims also, and its symbols in Blake are either beasts of prey or parasites … Among the beasts of prey are the serpent of Eden and the two monsters who appear at the end of Job, Behemoth and Leviathan’ (M&B, 249–50). ‘A heath, forest, or wilderness, called Entuthon Benython … Its individual form is the Tree of Mystery, the self-enrooting banyan of The Human Abstract, which is also the oak worshipped by the Druids, and, in the Bible, the tree of moral knowledge, the Cross and the barren fig-tree’ (M&B, 250).

Beauty and Truth I 33

CHAOTIC WORLD

MINERAL WORLD

Figure 1 (continued) EDEN

ULRO

‘The mineral world is a city of streets and highways, a city in which all buildings are One Temple, a house of many mansions, and that temple One (precious) Stone, the cornerstone of Zion’ (M&B, 247).

‘[A] demonic city, is featured by hierarchically shaped buildings like the pyramid or tower of Babel, servile architecture as Ruskin would call them, and by structures which, like the furnace, the winepress, and the mill, imprison fire or disintegrate form (M, 43.16 ff. [38.16 ff.])’ (M&B, 250).

‘The chaotic world, represented by the sea, disappears in the apocalypse (Revelation 21:1), its place being taken by a circulating river of fresh water (“the deeps shrink to their fountains,” as Blake says in America [8.8; K199/E54]). This river is the water of life restored to man, and as it is identical with the circulating blood of man’s risen body all water is a single “Globule of [man’s] Blood,” as Blake calls it’ (M&B, 247).

‘The sea (or snow or desert), the sea which as the “Red” Sea recalls the spilt blood of fallen man (M, 31.63 [29.63]) … As the Dead Sea or salt lake it is called Udan Adan (M, 25.60 [23.60])’ (M&B, 250).

Sodom, Pharaoh’s Egyptians, and, according to Milton, the Garden of Eden after the flood. To find Atlantis again we have only to drain the sea, not the Atlantic Ocean, but the ‘Sea of Time and Space’ on top of our imaginations (M, 17.36 ff. [15.36 ff.]). (M&B, 250–1)

(The imagery of the two worlds is summed up in Figure 1.) Just as Blakean narrative can be identified as purely aesthetic because it is mythical, so its meaning can be viewed in the same way owing to its being simply metaphorical. ‘A work of literary art,’ Frye argues, articulating an observation crucial to the understanding of his own critical practice, ‘owes its unity to this process of identification with, and its variety, clarity, and intensity to identification as’ (AC, 114). The formulation clearly represents Frye’s own account of beauty, his terminology deliberately evocative of St Thomas Aquinas’s assertion that beauty is integritas, consonantia, and claritas, as well as Stephen Dedalus’s famous consideration of that formulation in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it is suggestive of the aesthetic dimension of Frye’s

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view of Blake’s imagery. In terms of dianoia, then, Blake’s poetry is characterized by such unity, on the one hand, and variety, clarity, and intensity, on the other: its variety, clarity, and intensity deriving from, say, one tree being identified as all trees, and its unity from the bread and the wine being identified with the body and blood of the Lamb of God. Such identifications are balanced equally in Blake’s poetry, and this factor points to our conclusion about the aesthetic nature of meaning in Frye’s theory of Blake. In Blake’s poetry, identity with and identity as are achieved on equal terms, and so unity, on the one hand, and variety, clarity, and intensity, on the other, are equally important and equally fully realized in his poetry. Preliminary Conclusion To sum up what we have learned, the mythos of Blake’s poetry is mythical or purely literary, being the story of the ‘Giant Form’ Orc. In other words, it is mythopoeic narrative; it is pure form or structure. In terms of meaning, it is similarly disengaged with respect to social context, his poetry having no descriptive content: Frye thinks of the meaning of Blake’s poetry in terms of metaphor, and metaphor, as he states in Anatomy of Criticism, ‘turns its back on ordinary descriptive meaning’ (AC, 114). Thus far Frye’s conception of the narrative and meaning of Blake’s poetry has been identified as aesthetic, but if we conclude that his poetics of Blake is purely aesthetic, we must also conclude that his thinking is undialectical, that it is very much a part of the ordinary history of ideas, and that it is politically conservative. However, we view Blakean narrative as purely aesthetic because of our commonsense conceptions of subject and object. For Frye, subject and object are the result of ordinary descriptive language, and Blake’s poetry establishes new categories in opposition to those suggested by purely descriptive modes of thought. And we view the imagery of Blake’s poetry as purely aesthetic only when we fail to see that its forms are also the very forms of human desire, and that within this context beauty and poetic ‘truth’ are the same thing. A second survey reveals a second dimension to Frye’s theory of Blake’s poetry, which can be identified as socially oriented or concerned with poetic ‘truth,’ and therefore radical.

Beauty and Truth I 35

The Narrative and Meaning of Blake’s Poetry Revisited Narrative From another point of view, the story of Orc and Urizen is not a struggle between characters who are nothing other than mythical, or simply a narrative characterized by uninhibited artistic design. All of cyclical life is brought into metaphorical identification in these figures, and their story is the tragic story of cyclical life itself. A man may witness political revolution; he may also watch a sunrise, the symbolic rebirth of nature: but he cannot see these two phenomena simultaneously as two aspects of the same thing. But in Fearful Symmetry Frye explains that for Blake art tells us that ‘tears and tempests, joy and sunshine, love and the moon, death and winter, resurrection and spring’ (FS, 127) are all identical with one another. Ordinary perception tells us that human and natural orders are distinct, but ordinary perception is wrong. From Blake’s point of view, mankind fell into this state. Blake thinks in terms of a long or protracted Fall. In the beginning Albion lapses into passivity, metaphorically his sleep, an event which begins the Fall. The Blakean myth consists of seven periods or ‘Eyes of God,’ and the Fall is spread across the first three of these, Lucifer, Moloch, and the Elohim, which are also referred to by Frye, borrowing the terms of Hesiod and Ovid, as silver, bronze, and iron ages respectively. Before the completion of the Fall, the universe was inhabited by gigantic warring powers. ‘The silver age or Lucifer period,’ he explains, ‘was a time in which the universe was tearing apart in chaotic disorder, and gigantic energies, sprung from the body of Albion, were fighting for imaginative control of it’ (FS, 131). Human beings exist now on what Blake terms ‘the “Adamic” level of impotence’ (FS, 291), the level of fallen human experience. But if mankind has dwindled to the ‘Adamic level,’ the universe is still populated by giant forms, these being not powers separate from man, but the concealed reality of existing human forces: Gradually, as the universe took its present form, the weakening human imagination was slowly pushed down and contracted into its present helpless state. Yet gigantic energies still remain in men, imprisoned, but struggling to be free … This imprisoned Titanic power in man, which spasmodically causes revolutions, Blake calls Orc. (FS, 132)

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If we could recover original perception, all the subjective and objective aspects of existence would be united with one another once more, and the universe would be revealed as a struggle between Orc’s and Urizen’s giant forms. Poetry restores vision to its original state, and metaphor affords poetry its power. ‘The metaphor, in its radical form, is a statement of identification: the hero is a lion; this is that; A is B’ (M&B, 245), states Frye. And Blake’s central metaphors are his ‘Giant Forms,’ figures who are at once human personalities and aspects of nature. ‘Blake’s Tharmas, the “id” of the individual and the stampeding mob of society,’ he argues, ‘is also the god of the sea, Poseidon the earth-shaker. His connection with the sea,’ he goes on, ‘is not founded on resemblance or association, but, like the storm scene in King Lear, on an ultimate identity of human rage and natural tempest’ (M&B, 203). Blake’s poetry forges the identity of the world outside the artist and the world of the artist himself. Of course metaphor is the unit of myth, and if metaphor brings together the subjective and objective aspects of existence in space, myth unites them in space and time. Myth identifies entire natural cycles with one another. In ordinary or fallen experience, heavenly bodies go through their cycles; everything in the animal kingdom goes through its life cycle; the vegetable world has its annual cycle of seasons; cities expand and go into decline; and water goes ‘from rains to springs, from springs and fountains to brooks and rivers, from rivers to the sea or the winter snow, and back again’ (AC, 148). In the middle of all this, human life seems subject to two types of cyclical movement: the ‘imaginative cycle of waking and of dreaming life’ parallels the ‘solar cycle of light and darkness’; but ‘in common with animals, man exhibits the ordinary cycle of life and death’ (ibid.). The Orc–Urizen narrative, however, unites subject and object in space and time, and affords us a vision in which all cycles are identified with one another. Orc, Frye explains, ‘represents the return of the dawn and the spring and all the human analogies of their return: the continuous arrival of new life, the renewed sexual and reproductive power which that brings, and the periodic overthrow of social tyranny’ (FS, 208). Urizen is a variety of images suggestive of lower aspects of the same cycles: Urizen is a sky-god, for the remoteness and mystery of heaven is the first principle of his religion. He is old, but his age implies senility rather than

Beauty and Truth I 37 wisdom. He is cruel, for he stands for the barring of nature against the desires and hopes of man … Urizen is a white terror: his white beard, the freezing snows that cover him and the icicles and hoarfrost that stick on him, suggest the ‘colorless all-color of atheism,’ the nameless chilling fear of the unknown, that Melville depicts in his albino Leviathan. (FS, 211)

Blake’s poetry, then, is not purely aesthetic. In conclusion, life cycles get identified with each other in Blake’s poetry, and we follow the tragic narrative of a figure who is at once human, animal, and mineral, and so on. The Orc–Urizen narrative begins with a figure who is youth, morning, spring, and its rains (Orc), and concludes with a figure who is the death of a man, night, winter, and sea or snow (Urizen). Meaning Let us go back to the conception of the total natural cycle in which all the discrete categories of reality have vanished. As we have seen, in connection with Blake’s poetry Frye thinks in terms of a higher order of reality and a lower one, the ‘top half of the natural cycle’ and the ‘lower half’ (AC, 150). Blake’s poetry leads us to think in terms of a higher and lower order of nature, the world of innocence and the world of experience, and he associates these with Orc and Urizen respectively. In his view the world of experience is ‘the world that adults live in while they are awake’ (M&B, 190). The natural environment of the world of experience obeys ‘natural’ laws, and consequently nature is up to a point predictable and therefore habitable. Individuals in society are asked to obey ‘laws’ governing human behaviour, and so society, like nature, is, to an extent, stable. But not all of human existence follows the pattern of behaviour prescribed by law. The child who cries for the moon, Frye tells us, knows nothing of such laws, and, being free from laws of experience, his existence is emblematic of a different world. His is a world of innocence, the child being ‘a little bundle of anarchic will, whose desires takes no account of either the social or the natural order’ (M&B, 191). As the child matures into an adult, however, he rejects the power of desire, driving it ‘underground into the world of the dream’ (ibid.), which takes an increasingly sexual character. And this factor points to the dual nature of human history: the world of experience sits on ‘a volcano in which the

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rebellious Titan Orc … lies bound, writhing and struggling to get free’ (ibid.). To Blake’s mind, life understood in this way represents a hopeless deadlock. No power in human life points to a way in which social evils can be adequately dealt with. On the one hand, the world of dream is a perennial threat to the social order. When it throws off its chains, it manifests itself in war, ‘moral holidays of aggression in which robbery and murder become virtues instead of crimes’ (ibid.). At the same time, we can only feel impatient with the world of experience. ‘The social contract,’ Frye states, ‘which from a distance seems a reasonable effort of cooperation, looks closer up like an armed truce founded on passion, in which the real purpose of law is to defend by force what has been snatched in self-will’ (ibid.). Orc and Urizen, then, are devilish in each other’s worlds: While we dream, Urizen, the principle of reality, is the censor, or, as Blake calls him, the accuser, a smug and grinning hypocrite, an impotent old man, the caricature that the child in us makes out of the adult world that thwarts him. But as long as we are awake, Orc, the lawless pleasure principle, is an evil dragon bound under the conscious world in chains, and we all hope he will stay there. (ibid.)

A third factor in human life, however, makes it possible to move beyond the impasse of Orc and Urizen and create a world which is the opposite of Ulro. As already explained in chapter 2, the third factor is work, or constructive activity, symbolized by Los. Work, Frye argues, is related to both the world of innocence and the world of experience. It ‘takes the energy which is wasted in war or thwarted in dreams and sets it free to act in experience,’ while taking account of ‘law and of our waking ideas of reality’ (M&B, 192). It is the figure of the worker which Frye turns to in order to move beyond the Orc– Urizen impasse. Parodying the attitude of the mediocre mind towards dream, he states It is a great comfort to know that this world, in which we are compelled to spend about a third of our time, is unreal, and can never displace the world of experience in which reason predominates over passion, order over chaos, Classical values over Romantic ones, the solid over the gaseous, and the cool over the hot. (M&B, 191)

Beauty and Truth I 39

But the worker has a more sophisticated view of dream. The world of experience is not necessarily real: it is the ‘material cause’ of his work; similarly, the dream is not unreal but the ‘formal cause’ (M&B, 192). Work is ‘the realization of a dream … descended from the child’s lost vision of a world where the environment is the home’ (ibid.). By realizing in experience ‘the child’s and the dreamer’s worlds,’ work ‘indicates what there is about each that is genuinely innocent’ (ibid.). To return to Ulro and Eden, the two worlds are not merely worlds to be associated with the beauty of metaphor. Ulro is the world as it is ‘when no work is being done, the world where dreams are impotent and waking life haphazard’ (M&B, 195). Eden is the world of desire which the worker ‘realiz[es] in experience’ (M&B, 192). The forms we came across in the previous section of this chapter, ‘The city, the garden, and the sheepfold’ (M&B, 196), are not simply literary images – examples of identification as, generating variety, clarity, and intensity – but the human forms of the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds respectively, and the One God, the One Man, the Lamb, and related forms are the very forms of desire. The desirability of the identity of the individual with its class becomes clear if we consider the individual and his society. Also within this context we come across a necessary unity of opposites. Society without the individual gives us totalitarianism, where an invasive natural society prevents any real individuality from developing. The individual without society presents us with the anarchism of the human ego, taking no thought for the larger social context. The reconciliation of these two, then, is thoroughly desirable, and it is desirable not just in this context but on the level of each category of reality: In Ulro, and even in Generation, all classes or societies are aggregates of similar but separate individuals. But when man builds houses out of stones, and cities out of houses, it becomes clear that the real or intelligible form of a thing includes its relation to its environment as well as its self-contained existence. This environment is its own larger ‘human form.’ The stones that make a city do not cease to be stones, but they cease to be separate stones: their purpose, shape, and function is identical with that of the city as a whole. In the human world, as in the work of art, the individual thing is there, and the total form which gives it meaning is there: what has vanished is the shapeless collection or mass of similar things. This is what Blake means when he says that in the apocalypse all human forms are ‘identified’ [J, 99.1–2; K747/E258]. The same is true of the effect of work on human society. In a completely human society

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man would not lose his individuality, but he would lose his separate and isolated ego, what Blake calls his Selfhood. The prophetic vision of freedom and equality thus cannot stop at the Generation level of a Utopia, which means an orderly molecular aggregate of individuals existing in some future time. Such a vision does not capture, though it may adumbrate, the real form of society, which can only be a larger human body. This means literally the body of one man, though not of a separate man. Everywhere in the human world we find that the Ulro distinction between the singular and the plural has broken down. The real form of human society is the body of one man; the flock of sheep is the body of one lamb; the garden is the body of one tree, the so-called tree of life. The city is the body of one building or temple, a house of many mansions, and the building itself is the body of one stone, a glowing and fiery precious stone, the unfallen stone of alchemy which assimilates everything else to itself, Blake’s grain of sand which contains the world. (M&B, 197)

Similarly, examples of identification with – the identification of bread and wine with the body and blood of the Lamb of God – are not simply metaphors which produce artistic unity, but the identifications of desire, for everything is equal to everything else in the world shaped by human desire. Ulro is characterized by hierarchy, resulting in the great chain of being (ibid.). It is a world of the most rigid stratification: it stretches all the way from its gods at the top of the cosmos to Udan Adan, its saline seas, at the bottom, and represents a world of pure power or inequality. But in the human world, the world of desire, ‘all aspects of existence are equal as well as identical’ (ibid.). And therefore: The one man is also the one lamb, and the body and blood of the animal form are the bread and wine which are the human forms of the vegetable world. The tree of life is the upright vertebrate form of man; the living stone, the glowing transparent furnace, is the furnace of heart and lungs and bowels in the animal body. The river of life is the blood that circulates within that body. Eden, which according to Blake was a city as well as a garden, had a fourfold river, but no sea, for the river remained inside Paradise, which was the body of one man … The more developed society is, the more clearly man realizes that a society of gods would have to be, like the society of man, the body of one God. Eventually he realizes that the intelligible forms of man and of whatever is above man on the chain of being must be identical. The identity of God and man is for Blake the whole of Christianity. (M&B, 197–8)

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In the previous section we learned that Christ is the ‘unifying principle’ (M&B, 247), and within this new context this points to the fact that, as the figure in which all things are identical and therefore equal, the figure of Christ is the ultimate image of desire. Frye’s understanding of the social function and radical dimension of the meaning of Blake’s poetry becomes apparent now. The artist reveals ‘the form of the world as it would be if we could live in it here and now’ (M&B, 194), and Frye remarks that ‘Blake obviously hopes for a very considerable social response to vision in or soon after his lifetime’ (M&B, 358), though the ‘real “heaven” is not a glittering city’ (ibid.). We already know something about the kind of individual who might participate in the world of action in the light of this vision. In the exposition we have followed, it is the worker who is responsible for the work of the apocalypse. But in Frye’s view the ‘true hero’ may be a ‘thinker, fighter, artist, martyr, or ordinary worker’ (M&B, 200). (We shall return to the figure of the ‘ordinary worker’ in chapter 5.) Each of these ‘helps in achieving the apocalyptic vision of art; and an act is anything that has a real relation to that achievement’ (ibid.). Such action in the light of apocalypse leads the individual away from common-sense conceptions of time and space. ‘Such an apocalypse is entirely impossible under the conditions of experience that we know, and could only take place in the eternal and infinite context that is given it by religion’ (M&B, 93). This does not mean, however, that ‘all practicable improvement of human status … remains forever out of man’s reach’ (ibid.). We make this inference because we confuse the eternal with the indefinite: we are so possessed by the categories of time and space that we can hardly think of eternity and infinity except as endless time and space, respectively. But the home of time, so to speak, the only part of time that man can live in, is now; and the home of space is here. In the world of experience there is no such time as now; the present never quite exists, but is hidden somewhere between a past that no longer exists and a future that does not yet exist … In both time and space man is being continually excluded from his own home. The dreamer, whose space is inside his mind, has a better notion of where ‘here’ is, and the child, who is not yet fully conscious of the iron chain of memory that binds his ego to time and space, still has some capacity for living in the present. It is to this perspective that man returns when his conception of ‘reality’ begins to acquire some human meaning. (M&B, 193–4)

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We have come full circle, reaching a second conclusion about Frye’s conception of the dianoia of Blake’s poetry, but the structures of imagery we started off with can now be seen to be the contending realities of human experience: these worlds are not simply metaphorical but the world that fallen life aspires to (Eden) and the world it rejects and tries to escape from (Ulro). Conclusion For Frye, Blake’s poetry is not a reflection of external events. Rather than offering socially concerned commentary on the social evils of its day, it is unapologetically aesthetic: in terms of narrative it is pure structure or design; in terms of imagery it is characterized by unity as well as variety, clarity, and intensity. At the same time, however, Blake’s poetry is concerned with poetic ‘truth’ and possesses an important social function. Rather than being a series of purely aesthetic creations, Blake’s poetry provides us with a condensed vision of fallen existence as well as the vision of the end of human labours in the form of Blake’s Eden. (We shall deal with variations on this vision in chapters 4 and 7.) Within this context poetic ‘truth’ and beauty represent a necessary unity rather than an inevitable dichotomy. The ‘pure structure’ and the literary imagery represent poetic ‘truth’; the vision of fallen existence and the apocalyptic and demonic worlds are beautiful. Crucially, the ‘pure structure’ and the vision of fallen existence are the same thing, and that thing beautiful and ‘true’; and the literary imagery and the vision of Eden and Ulro are the same thing, and that thing also beautiful and ‘true.’ Frye’s theory of Blake’s poetry is dialectical criticism which transcends the level on which Blake’s poetry is understood as either an aesthetic object or a mirror held up to the society of the time. As such it eschews distinct political identities, and can be said to be beyond the conservative and radical viewpoints. It may, therefore, be thought of as a suprahistorical set of ideas belonging to a world above the ordinary cyclical history of ideas. Blake’s poetry is a source of authority in society in its own right, and Frye clearly felt that the authority of Blake’s poetry could intervene in history in his time. ‘Read Blake or go to hell; that’s my message to the modern world,’ he wrote in a letter to Helen Kemp in 1935 (NFHK, 1:426). At the same time, however, Blake’s poetry can be viewed as one element within a larger framework of authority: the whole of literature.

4 Beauty and Truth II: Frye’s Theory of Secular Literature

Frye emphasized the fact that in the twentieth century the ironic mode was in the ascendancy. Fictions, he argues in Anatomy, ‘may be classified … by the hero’s power of action’ (AC, 31). In the ironic mode the reader looks down on ‘a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity’ (AC, 32). His consideration of the ‘thematic poet’ (AC, 56) of this mode takes him into the heart of the modernist movement, and the observations he makes about literature in this context are of special significance for this chapter. In the ironic mode the poet dedicates his energies to his ‘literal function as a maker of poems’ (AC, 57). ‘At his best,’ he writes, ‘he is a dedicated spirit, a saint or anchorite of poetry (ibid.); the great writers of this age are ‘“pure” artists’ (ibid.). He also thinks in terms of a pact between such ‘pure artists’ and New Critics, both of whom are occupied with ‘literal meaning’: Literal meaning, as we expounded it, has much to do with the techniques of thematic irony introduced by symbolisme, and with the view of many of the ‘new’ critics that poetry is primarily (i.e., literally) an ironic structure. (AC, 108)

In his discussion of the phases of symbolism, he presents us with this brief account of ‘new criticism’: What is now called ‘new criticism’ … is largely criticism based on the conception of a poem as literally a poem. It studies the symbolism of a poem as an ambiguous structure of interlocking motifs; it sees the poetic pattern

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of meaning as a self-contained ‘texture,’ and it thinks of the external relations of a poem as being with the other arts, to be approached only with the Horatian warning of favete linguis [Odes, 3.1.2], and not with the historical or didactic. (AC, 75)

As Frank Lentricchia points out, Anatomy of Criticism includes a series of ‘anti–New Critical polemical remarks.’1 Frye refers to New Criticism somewhat disparagingly as ‘the aesthetic view’ (AC, 325). As with ‘conservative’ Blake criticism, the problem with this aesthetic view seems to derive from questions surrounding the social reference of literature. A little further on in his consideration of symbolism, he speaks of the drawbacks of types of symbolism which demote or ignore the social context. He thinks in terms of five phases of symbolism, and, having introduced the literal phase, associated with New Criticism and a purely aesthetic attitude, he goes on to speak of the third phase of symbolism, describing it as every bit as ‘aesthetic’ as the literal phase: The formal or third phase of narrative and meaning, although it includes the external relations of literature to events and ideas, nevertheless brings us back ultimately to the aesthetic view of the work of art as an object of contemplation, a techne designed for ornament and pleasure rather than use. (AC, 106–7)

Needless to say, the view which throws the emphasis entirely upon ‘use’ is equally one-sided. Discussing the descriptive phase of meaning, Frye offers the following précis: Descriptively, a poem is not primarily a work of art, but primarily a verbal structure or set of representative words, to be classed with other verbal structures like books on gardening. In this context narrative means the relation of the order of words to events resembling the events in ‘life’ outside; meaning means the relation of its pattern to a body of assertive propositions, and the conception of symbolism involved is the one which literature has in common, not with the arts, but with other structures in words. (AC, 72)

Of course, such a view represents a critical orientation paralleling the one in Blake scholarship associated with Berger. The approach in question produces significant literary criticism, but this is not the approach Frye wishes to promote. In fact, he has as many reservations about crit-

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icism of this type as any New Critic does. Again, we can employ the terms ‘beauty’ and ‘truth.’ As in the context of Blake studies, Frye is not satisfied with an exclusive focus on beauty or ‘truth’ within the context of literary criticism, for ‘beauty’ in this context is beauty without poetic ‘truth,’ and ‘truth’ is suggestive of ‘truth’ without beauty. Just as Blake scholarship is characterized by political affinities, so, too, are the kinds of approach Frye discusses in this section of Anatomy of Criticism. Within the context of literature the approach of the New Critics, with their emphasis on the aesthetic artefact and their ignoring of the social function of literature, is clearly also a conservative view. The rudimentary facts about New Criticism clarify this point. In his Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton speaks of the New Critics as premodern and quixotic in their sensibility; and their politics descend from these factors: Significantly, the American movement had its roots in the economically backward South – in the region of traditional blood and breeding where the young T.S. Eliot had gained an early glimpse of the organic society. In the period of American New Criticism, the South was in fact undergoing rapid industrialization, invaded by Northern capitalist monopolies; but ‘traditional’ Southern intellectuals like John Crowe Ransom, who gave New Criticism its name, could still discover in it an ‘aesthetic’ alternative to the sterile scientific rationalism of the industrial North. Spiritually displaced like T.S. Eliot by the industrial invasion, Ransom found refuge first in the so-called Fugitives literary movement of the 1920s, and then in the right-wing Agrarian politics of the 1930s.2

‘New Criticism’ argues Eagleton, ‘was at root a full-blooded irrationalism, one closely associated with religious dogma (several of the leading American New Critics were Christians), and with the right-wing ‘blood and soil’ politics of the Agrarian movement’ (Eagleton, 49). New critics’ conservatism is of course one element in a coherent world view. Frye, who identified the English tradition as predominantly ‘Romantic, revolutionary, and Protestant’ (FI, 1), speaks of New Criticism’s ‘conservative, Catholic, and southern leanings’ (WE, 597), a triad that unsurprisingly reminds us to a significant extent of the stance spoken of by T.S. Eliot as ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, anglo-catholic in religion.’3 In contrast to this, the descriptive phase, with its emphasis on ‘truth’ and engagement with the ordinary world of social injustice, seems

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bound up to varying degrees with the left-wing political stances; in its most unapologetic form it is unequivocally radical. Again, the elementary facts of this development in criticism and theory testify to its political alliances. In their Literary Criticism: A Short History, which provides us with a useful account of the ‘socio-realist tradition of literary criticism,’ Wimsatt and Brooks argue that realism was a reaction against ‘classic composure and conservative morality.’4 They begin with Courbet’s exhibition of 1855 and the publication of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1856, before going on to discuss Zola’s conception of naturalism in connection with Claude Bernard. ‘“Naturalism,”’ they argue, ‘had all along made a strong claim to be socially oriented. It showed a modern conscience for the plight of the working classes. It dealt with ordinary folk here and now … That is, naturalism was contemporary and socially didactic’ (460). They then turn their attention to the ‘didactic theory of literature’ which burgeoned in the Czarist Russia of the midnineteenth century, which is of course left-wing: ‘In the work of Belinsky’s disciples,’ explain Wimsatt and Brooks, ‘deterministic materialism, hedonistic utilitarianism, and enlightened egoism unite paradoxically with fervour for social reform and a revolutionary spirit of sacrifice and social optimism’ (461–2). They go on to focus on Tolstoy, who is identified as ‘The greatest Russian figure to participate in the 19th-century complex of socio-realistic theory’ (462). Of particular interest to us is the fact that this tradition culminates in Marxist criticism in Russia and in the ‘instructed echoes of this in English and American writing which sounded in the later 1920’s and the 1930’s’ (468). Wimsatt and Brooks speak in illuminating terms of the embodiment of the theory in America: In America the idea of a socially active literature appears during the first decades of the 20th century with the ‘muckraking’ movement (of which Upton Sinclair’s Mammonart, 1924, may stand as the sufficient symbol) and after that in overtly Marxist criticism of the later twenties and thirties … Here we meet the barefaced rehearsal of the whole canon of Marxist ideas – much about the pessimism and decay of the middle class, the inferiority of the ‘bourgeois sexual code,’ the modern sell-out of human values to the ‘burgher,’ much about the ‘creative role’ of the worker and the need of the novelist to keep up with the ‘vanguard of the Proletariat.’ (470)

We note in passing that the ‘socio-realistic theory’ surfaces in a prerevolutionary society (Russia), and in two countries in which revolution

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is, from the Marxist point of view, unfinished business (France and the United States of America). Taken together these two political approaches to literature might be viewed as representing a cycle within the history of ideas. Clearly, the territory beyond the level where one settles for one half of a dialectic is what is desirable, and it is this level, the post-partisan and suprahistorical level, which interests Frye first and foremost in this area of scholarship, too. Imre Salusinszky sees Frye’s time as one in which two views of literature clash with one another: referring to ‘vulgar’ Marxism and New Criticism, he speaks of the ‘historical determinism’ of the former and the ‘linguistic nihilism’ of the latter.5 Frye’s own theory is again one which is characterized by a dialectical sensibility which aims to combine considerations of both poetic ‘truth’ and beauty and move beyond radical and conservative viewpoints, thereby transcending the ordinary history of ideas. The Whole of Literature Frye’s literary theory is focused on what he terms ‘the whole of literature,’ and before proceeding to the main analysis, this crucial point requires consideration. While it is self-evidently the case that Blake’s poetry can be, indeed must be, approached as a whole, it is far from selfevident that the whole of literature forms a similarly coherent unit, but this is Frye’s point of departure. In The Educated Imagination he appeals to the reader, reminding him or her of how we continually add to our ‘knowledge’ of literature: All the themes and characters and stories that you encounter in literature belong to one interlocking family. You can see how true this is if you think of such words as tragedy or comedy or satire or romance: certain typical ways in which stories get told. You keep associating your literary experiences together: you’re always being reminded of some other story you read or movie you saw or character that impressed you. (EICT, 452)

Frye argues that ‘you don’t just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms a part’ (EICT, 460). From his point of view the only possible inference is that ‘literature is a total form’ (AC, 109). Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that he is not simply moving from poem to poem, or from one aesthetic experience to another:

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he is also entering into a coherent and progressive discipline. For literature is not simply an aggregate of books and poems and plays: it is an order of words. And our total literary experience, at any given time, is not a discrete series of memories or impressions of what we have read, but an imaginatively coherent body of experience. (M&B, 32)

On this level of response the symbol, the image which seems to come up time and time again in our reading of literature, is the archetype. Frye states, ‘I mean by an archetype a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience’ (AC, 91–2). In this section of Anatomy of Criticism, he speaks of the ‘repetition of certain common images of physical nature like the sea or the forest’ (AC, 92), and goes on to identify such images as ‘conventional archetypes of literature’: ‘A symbol like the sea or the heath cannot remain within Conrad or Hardy: it is bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole (AC, 93). This view of literature itself is suggestive of Blakean apocalyptic vision. In Ulro, as we know from the discussion presented in the previous chapter, objects are characterized by ‘discreteness and opacity’: ‘all classes or societies are aggregates of similar but separate individuals’ (M&B, 196, 197). The ‘human form,’ however, ‘includes its relation to its environment as well as its self-contained existence’ (M&B, 197). The stones that make a city cease to be separate stones. In the human world ‘the individual thing is there, and the total form which gives it meaning is there’ (ibid.); what is not there is the shapeless collection or mass of similar things. The inference is clear: the archetypal view of literature, insisting on a total form of literature, is the Edenic view of literature. Looking back to our previous chapter, Frye’s view of Blake’s poetry is similarly Edenic. Blake’s poems are not seen by Frye as an aggregate but as a unity. In chapter 1 of Fearful Symmetry, having spoken of Blake’s engraving procedure, he goes on to articulate an important critical principle: ‘the engraved poems were intended to form an exclusive and definitive canon’ (FS, 14). The Mythos and Dianoia of Literature as a Whole As with Blakean narrative, Frye views the narrative of the whole of literature as partly aesthetic and conservative: like Blake’s narrative, it is mythical, ‘abstract and conventionalized’ (AC, 124), and apparently as detached from its social context as possible. In the previous chapter, I discussed the fact that Frye thinks in terms of a top half of the natural cycle and a bot-

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tom half, where the top half is ‘the world of romance and the analogy of innocence’ and the bottom ‘the world of “realism” and the analogy of experience’ (AC, 150). Frye argues that literature is characterized by four types of mythical movement: ‘within romance, within experience, down, and up’ (ibid.). The ‘within romance’ movement is, naturally, the narrative of romance; the ‘within experience’ movement, that of satire and irony. The ‘downward movement’ is ‘the tragic movement’; the corresponding ‘upward movement’ is the ‘comic movement’ (ibid.). If we put all this together, we arrive at Frye’s conception of literature’s ‘central unifying myth,’ this being the ‘story of the loss and regaining of identity’ (EICT, 455). The ‘within romance’ aspect of the cycle corresponds to the ‘adventures’; the downwards movement represents tragic death; the ‘within experience’ aspect refers to the disappearance of the hero; and the upward movement his reappearance and the development of a new society around him. For Frye the story of literature is not a tragedy as it is in the account of Blake that we considered in chapter 3. Using his preferred Greek terms, he associates romance with agon, tragedy with pathos, sparagmos with ‘realism,’ and anagnorisis with comedy: The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth. Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvellous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized, or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy. (AC, 179)

Frye connects the episodes of the central myth with seasonal imagery, associating romance, tragedy, satire and irony, and comedy, with summer, autumn, winter, and spring respectively. Interestingly, Frye made a crucial change to this central unifying myth as his thinking developed. In its initial form, laid out in ‘The Archetypes of Literature’ (EICT, 130–1), the narrative has a much darker hue. It begins with romance, which in this rendering of the myth is the mythos of spring, moves on to comedy (summer), before tragedy (autumn), and finally satire and irony (winter). Originally, then, he stuck to the order he found in Spengler, where the focus is the steady decline of the West in

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four stages corresponding to the seasons: medieval (spring), Renaissance (summer), eighteenth-century (autumn), and contemporary (winter) (NFMC, 203). The form Frye settled upon, however, is an optimistic or comic one, ending with a happy resolution, where romance is the mythos of summer, marking the beginning of the central unifying myth, while comedy is the mythos of spring and represents the joyful conclusion of the narrative. For Frye this is the central story that literature tells. The story is the ‘story of the loss and regaining of identity’; it is the story of the ‘hero with a thousand faces’ and tells the tale of his ‘adventures, death, disappearance, and marriage or resurrection’ (EICT, 455). In The Educated Imagination he speaks of this story as one which deals with ‘how man once lived in a Golden Age or a Garden of Eden or the Hesperides, or a happy island kingdom in the Atlantic, how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again’ (EICT, 454). Turning to dianoia, Frye argues that the meaning of literature as a whole is at least partly aesthetic in nature, too. If the narrative of literature as a whole is entirely mythical, its dianoia is purely metaphorical, and for this reason it can be thought of as purely aesthetic. Literary imagery relates to what he terms the ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘demonic’ worlds, and archetypal metaphor is the organizing principle of these worlds. In his discussion of conceptions of metaphor in the ‘Theory of Symbols,’ he speaks of the nature of metaphor on the archetypal level. Again we come across identification as and identification with: the identification of the rose with all poetic roses is identification as; its identification with different things represents identity with. Archetypal metaphor involves the identity of each individual with its class, and the identity of each category of reality with each of the others, the identity of each individual with its class being identity as, the identity of each category of reality with each of the others being identity with: Archetypally, where the symbol is an associative cluster, the metaphor unites two individual images, each of which is a specific representative of a class or genus. The rose in Dante’s Paradiso and the rose in Yeats’s early lyrics are identified with different things, but both stand for all roses – all poetic roses, of course, not all botanical ones. Archetypal metaphor thus involves the use of what has been called the concrete universal, the

Beauty and Truth II 51 individual identified with its class, Wordsworth’s ‘Tree, of many, one’ … (AC, 115)

Archetypal metaphor, then, leads us to think not just of the city, the garden, and the sheepfold and other parallel forms, but of a reality in which all categories are ‘identical with the others and with each individual within it’ (AC, 131). Frye begins with five categories of reality. The divine world is both a ‘society of gods’ and ‘One God’; the human world a ‘society of men’ and ‘One Man’; the animal world a sheepfold and ‘One Lamb’; the vegetable world a garden or park and ‘One Tree (of Life)’; and the mineral world a city and ‘One Building, Temple, Stone’ (ibid.). Frye is dealing with secular literature, but the Christian Bible set up a ‘mythological universe’ within which Western literature operated until the eighteenth century (GC, 5), and so the imagery Frye deals with in this secular context is to a significant extent Biblical: divine world human world animal world vegetable world mineral world

= = = = =

society of gods society of men sheepfold garden or park city

= = = = =

One God One Man One Lamb One Tree (of Life) One Building, Temple, Stone (AC, 131)

Just as in the context of Blake’s Ulro Frye uncovers concrete universals which contrast with those of Eden, so in this area he identifies examples of the concrete universals of the demonic world contrasting with those of the apocalyptic world. ‘In the Bible,’ he observes, for example, ‘the wasteland appears in its concrete universal form in the tree of death, the tree of forbidden knowledge in Genesis, the barren fig tree of the Gospels, and the cross … Corresponding to the temple or One Building of the apocalypse, we have the prison or dungeon, the sealed furnace of heat without light, like the City of Dis in Dante’ (AC, 138–9). Additionally, ‘identity with’ determines that each of these worlds is identical with all the others. Transubstantiation identifies all these worlds with one another: The animal and vegetable worlds are identified with each other, and with the divine and human worlds as well, in the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the essential human forms of the vegetable world

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– food and drink, the harvest and the vintage, the bread and the wine – are the body and blood of the Lamb who is also Man and God, and in whose body we exist as in a city or temple. (AC, 132)

He adds two more categories of reality to his argument, fire and water, making the levels of reality the same as those in his theory of Blake: all of the categories are ‘identifi[able] with fire or thought of as burning’ (AC, 134), and they can be understood in terms of identity with water as well. The metaphor is ‘the conception “Christ,”’ which ‘unites all these categories in identity’: Christ is both the one God and the one Man, the Lamb of God, the tree of life, or vine of which we are the branches, the stone which the builders rejected, and the rebuilt temple which is identical with his risen body. (AC, 131)

And just as images are brought into metaphorical identification in the apocalyptic context, they are identifiable with one another in the demonic context, too. The imagery of cannibalism – ‘Dante’s last vision of human hell is of Ugolino gnawing his tormentor’s skull (AC, 137) – serves as a parody of the ‘Eucharist symbolism of the apocalyptic world’ (ibid.). Frye also gives instances of Biblical imagery in which demonic human, animal, and mineral societies are all identified with one another: ‘In the Bible, where the demonic society is represented by Egypt and Babylon, the rulers of each are identified with monstrous beasts: Nebuchadnezzar turns into a beast in Daniel, and Pharaoh is called a riverdragon by Ezekiel’ (AC, 138). Literature as a whole, then, is characterized by the same unity and variety, clarity, and intensity that Blake’s poetry is, its variety, clarity, and intensity deriving from the one lamb being identified with all animals, its unity from the bread and the wine being identified with ‘the body and blood of the Lamb who is also Man and God, and in whose body we exist as in a city or temple’ (AC, 132). Moreover, apocalypse points to the achievement of identity with and identity as on equal terms, so in this world of literature, as in Blake’s cosmos, unity, on the one hand, and variety, clarity, and intensity, on the other, are again achieved on equal terms. Preliminary Conclusion The mythos of literature is myth. In other words it is pure ‘stylization’ with no concessions to ‘realism’; it is form at the expense of content;

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structure rather than representation. In terms of meaning, literature is similarly disengaged with respect to social context. Just as in the first survey the meaning of Blake’s poetry is purely metaphorical, so at first glance the meaning of literature as a whole is metaphorical and literary rather than socially engaged in any conventional sense. Were we to stop at this stage, we would have to conclude that Frye’s literary theory is every bit as purely aesthetic and conservative as that of the New Critics, and therefore every bit as much a part of the ordinary history of ideas. Again, we view the narrative of the central myth as purely fictional because of our common-sense conceptions of subject and object, and we view literary imagery as purely aesthetic only when we fail to see that its forms are also the very forms of human desire, and that whatever is beautiful in this context is also an image of poetic ‘truth.’ Our next task is to uncover a second dimension of his literary theory paralleling his view of the social function of Blake’s poetry. The Mythos and Dianoia of Literature as a Whole Revisited Narrative For Frye, the mythos of the whole of literature may be ‘mythical’ and ‘abstractly literary’ (AC, 128), but it is not purely aesthetic. Rather, it is a narrative that tells the story of the whole of life. We might proceed by returning to his conception of metaphor. In Frye’s view ‘the clear separation of subject and object’ starts with what he terms ‘the third phase of language’ (GC, 31). Literature, and in particular metaphor, undoes the dichotomy of subject and object. ‘The purest form of metaphor,’ he asserts, ‘is the god, who is an identity of some kind of personality or consciousness and some aspect of the natural world, as with a sea-god or sky-god or love-goddess’ (NFR, 102). The metaphor, then, is the figure in which a man is identified with an aspect of nature, and it effects an identification between the world of the subject and that of the object. ‘It is one of the functions of literature in our day,’ he states in Creation and Recreation, ‘more particularly of poetry, to keep reviving the metaphorical habit of mind, the primitive sense of identity between subject and object which is most clearly expressed in the pagan “god,” who is at once a personality and a natural image’ (NFR, 78). Metaphor can be explained in another way. As well as the identification of subject with object, it can be viewed as the identification of the

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object with the subject. To use the language of Fearful Symmetry, ‘the universal perception of the particular’ (FS, 125) applies to natural objects as well as human forms. As soon as an aspect of nature is possessed by the human mind, it becomes identical with an aspect of human life. In Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ the daffodils are transformed into the personal possession of the poet. ‘The flowers become poetic flowers as soon as they’re identified with a human mind. Here we have an image from the natural world, a field of daffodils: it’s enclosed inside the human mind, which puts it into the world of the imagination’ (EICT, 461). Speaking of images such as a ‘flock of sheep or a field of flowers,’ Frye states: ‘There’s always some literary reason for using them, and that means something in human life that they correspond to or represent or resemble’ (EICT, 458). Frye illustrates his point with reference to Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose.’ The poem is not an allegory; nor is it allusive: ‘To understand Blake’s poem … you simply have to accept a world which is totally symbolic: a world in which roses and worms are so completely surrounded and possessed by the human mind that whatever goes on between them is identical with something going on in human life’ (EICT, 463). And just as the ‘god’ ultimately identifies a man with everything in creation, so this type of metaphor results in the identification of everything in creation with human life. The writer is neither a watcher nor a dreamer. Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn’t escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it. And the imagination won’t stop until it’s swallowed everything. No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the human imagination … a universe entirely possessed and occupied by human life, a city of which the stars are suburbs. (EICT, 465)

(The reader may hear the echo of 1 Corinthians 15:54: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’) Thus far I have focused on identity derived from metaphor, but metaphor is the unit of the myth, and to understand how literature tells the story of the whole of life we must turn to myth, or the continuous use of metaphor. Subject and object exist in time. In the world created by descriptive language man lives a cyclical life and all around him he sees similar cycles. The sun follows its daily path; the vegetable world comes to life in spring and returns to seed in winter; new life also appears in

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the animal world in spring. Usually, man also has some conception of the life of his gods, who also get born, mature, and die before rebirth. Man himself understands that his own life is subject to two forms of cyclical development. Like the sun, he rises in the morning and enters a shady underworld at night. In line with plant and animal life, he grows, matures, and dies. But ordinary life is characterized by a clear distinction between subject and object. Man’s life cycle may be ‘like’ that of the sun or the creatures of the animal kingdom, but it is always distinct from them. Man’s life cycle, we might say, is the subject in time; everything else is the object in time. But while in life these cycles are discrete, they are not necessarily separate from the point of view of literature. Rather than describing these life cycles, literature transforms the world of ordinary experience. Ultimately, what metaphor identifies are life cycles, the life cycle of a man with that of the vegetable world, the animal world, and so on. The story of literature is a narrative which deals with ‘a figure who is partly the sun, partly vegetative fertility, and partly a god or archetypal human being (EICT, 130). This central story is concerned with four episodes corresponding to the four phases of the natural cycles: the first that of maturity, noon, fountains, and summer; the second, age, evening, rivers, and autumn; the third, death, night, sea or snow, and winter; and lastly, youth, morning, rains, and spring.6 The hero’s maturity is identified with noon, fountains, and summer; and his age and death are identified with evening, rivers, and autumn, and with night, sea or snow, and winter respectively. The narrative ends with a figure who is morning, spring, its rains, and a youth. The phases are of course romance, tragedy, satire and irony, and comedy in that order. Symbols such as morning and noon, youth and maturity, rain and fountains, spring and summer represent a higher order of nature. Evening and night, rivers and sea or snow, age and death, and autumn and winter as symbols belong to a corresponding lower dimension. The upper half is in Frye’s theory ‘the world of romance and the analogy of innocence’; the bottom ‘the world of “realism” and the analogy of experience’ (AC, 150). Literature, then, deals with a figure who starts out in the world of romance, falls towards experience, and passes through an underworld of symbols of death and decline, before rising into the world of innocence from where he started. In literature, then, subject and object are one, and literature tells the story of the hero figure in whom the two are united. Literature is an invitation to quit what Blake calls ‘the same dull round,’7 the world where

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heavenly bodies follow their paths, where all life burgeons and then goes into decline, where empires rise and fall, and so on. Progress in this other world of literature involves the same fearful elements of experience as ordinary life: decline and death, winter’s ‘iron car,’ frost, and night. The difference is that here they have become aspects of one identity. But literature invites us to see this darkest hour as an episode in a longer narrative. We must brave the loss of identity to pass on to its recovery. Needless to say, the recoverable identity has nothing to do with that of ordinary waking consciousness. It is a figure who, as in Blake’s lyric ‘To Spring,’ is a youth with ‘dewy locks’ who is both spring and morning and the ‘pearls’ he scatters upon the ‘love-sick land’ mourning for him. ‘Much of my critical thinking,’ Frye explains, ‘has turned on the double meaning of Aristotle’s term anagnorisis, which can mean “discovery” or “recognition,” depending on whether the emphasis falls on the newness of the appearance or on its reappearance’ (WP, 16). He describes the regaining of identity most powerfully when discussing Milton. ‘The recovery of identity,’ he states, ‘is not the feeling that I am myself and not another, but the realization that there is only one man, one mind, and one world, and that all walls of partition have been broken down forever’ (M&B, 131). (Once again, Frye derives his turn of phrase from Scripture: ‘For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us’ [Ephesians 2:14].) Meaning Similarly, the meaning of literature is not simply a pattern of purely ‘literary’ imagery, which is free of engagement with human society. In The Educated Imagination Frye hits upon the charming idea of consigning his reader to a shipwrecked life on an uninhabited island in the South Seas. In this situation, he tells us, one takes a long look at the world around oneself, ‘a world of sky and sea and earth and stars and trees and hills’: You see this world as objective, as something set over against you and not yourself or related to you in any way … It’s full of animals and plants and insects going on with their own business, but there’s nothing that responds to you: it has no morals and no intelligence, or at least none that you can grasp. It may have a shape and a meaning, but it doesn’t seem to be a human shape or a human meaning. (EICT, 438)

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The island serves the same purpose as Ulro does in Frye’s account of Blake: it is the world before human energy goes to work. Faced with an alien environment, one would go to work to begin the slow transformation of this Ulro-like natural world into a human one: The world you want to live in is a human world, not an objective one: it’s not an environment but a home; it’s not the world you see but the world you build out of what you see. You go to work to build a shelter or plant a garden, and as soon as you start to work you’ve moved into a different level of human life. (EICT, 439–40)

This is life on the level of practical skills, which contrasts with the original kind of existence, which Frye calls the ‘speculative level.’ Of course animals also go to work on the natural environment. ‘In this island,’ he quips, ‘probably, and certainly if you were alone, you’d have about the ranking of a second-rate animal’ (EICT, 440–1). Echoing well-known passages in Anatomy of Criticism,8 Frye argues – in a passage marked by Blake-inspired poetics rather than the Aristotelian doctrine of mimesis – that what distinguishes man is a third level of the mind, ‘a vision or model in your mind of what you want to construct’: The actions of man are prompted by desire, and some of these desires are needs, like food and warmth and shelter … But there’s also a desire to bring a more social human form into existence: the forms of cities and gardens and farms that we call civilization. Many animals and insects have this social form too, but man knows that he has it: he can compare what he does with what he can imagine being done. So we begin to see where the imagination belongs in the scheme of human affairs. It’s the power of constructing possible models of human experience. (EICT, 441)

This third level is the ‘level of imagination.’ Frye holds back from connecting the world of imagination with the ‘world of action’; in the first instance, the imagination produces literature. Frye argues that the three attitudes of mind are suggestive of three languages which appear in society, these being ‘the language of ordinary conversation, the language of practical skills, and the language of literature’ (EICT, 446). For Frye literature, more specifically poetry, provides all models for genuine human work. ‘The efficient cause of civilization is work,’ he states, ‘and poetry in its social aspect has the function of expressing, as a verbal hypothesis, a vision of the goal of work and the forms of desire’ (AC, 98).

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Literature, however, also provides mankind with a corresponding order which represents a projection of repulsion rather than desire. Literature remembers human life in an alien environment before work transforms that world into a home. As he says, ‘there is … a moral dialectic in desire’ (ibid.). For Frye, literature shows us that man stands between a better world and a much worse one, the former world above him, the latter below him. ‘Literature gives us an experience that stretches us vertically to the heights and depths of what the human mind can conceive … In this perspective what I like or don’t like disappears,’ he states, ‘because there’s nothing left of me as a separate person: as a reader of literature I exist only as a representative of humanity as a whole’ (EICT, 472–3). Needless to say, all the forms we came across in my consideration of the aesthetic dimension of Frye’s theory represent the forms of human desire and their opposites. Once more, the One God, the One Man, the One Lamb, and related forms are not simply literary images – examples of identification as, generating variety, clarity, and intensity – but the very forms of desire, belonging to a world in which the dichotomy of the individual and its class has been transformed into a unity. Before work has begun to transform the natural environment ‘all classes or societies are aggregates of similar but separate individuals’ (M&B, 197), but, as in Frye’s theory of Blake, the world of desire revealed by literature is one in which the distinction between singular and plural is transcended. Additionally, though the ordinary world is hierarchical, the great chain of being is dispensed with in the world that is shaped by human desire, and all categories of reality, the divine, human, animal, vegetable, and mineral, are equal and identical, as in Blake’s Eden. Examples of identification with – the identification of bread and wine with the body and blood of the Lamb of God – are not simply metaphors which produce aesthetic unity, but the identifications of desire, everything being equal to everything else in the world shaped by human desire. Once again, within this context, as the figure in which all things are identical and therefore equal, the figure of Christ is the ultimate image of desire. Once more we have come full circle. Our second survey of Frye’s theory of the dianoia of literature as a whole has revealed that the structures of imagery identified in the first discussion are in fact bound up with what Frye conceives of as the social function of literature and therefore its radical dimension. In terms of meaning, then, literature as a whole deals with worlds in which there is no change, worlds beyond inno-

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cence and experience. Metaphorically, these worlds are ‘up’ and ‘down.’ ‘In literature,’ he states, ‘we always seem to be looking either up or down. It’s the vertical perspective that’s important, not the horizontal one that looks out to life’ (EICT, 471). The images of literature are not simply literary, figures from which we derive aesthetic pleasure. The authority of literature is entirely a matter of its capacity to reveal heaven and hell, the world we want to live in and the world we want to escape from: Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat show, but the range of the articulate imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell. Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man … (EICT, 474)

Conclusion For Frye literature is self-sufficient. Rather than offering socially concerned commentary, it is freely mythical in terms of narrative, and, in relation to dianoia, it is characterized by unity, but also variety, clarity, and intensity. At the same time, secular literature, like Blake’s poetry, possesses an important social function. Rather than being an ‘autonomous verbal structure’ (AC, 68), literature from this point of view is a mythical account of the possible deliverance of mankind from bondage, and, in terms of meaning, a vision of the world of desire and the world desire rejects. Within this context poetic ‘truth’ and beauty, once again, represent a necessary unity rather than an inevitable dichotomy. The ‘central myth’ and the literary imagery of apocalyptic and demonic worlds represent poetic ‘truth,’ and the myth of deliverance and vision of the end of human labours in the form of an apocalyptic world of fulfilled desire are beautiful. As in Frye’s theory of Blake’s poetry, the independent vision and the ‘myth of deliverance’ are the same thing, and that thing beautiful and ‘true’; and the literary imagery and the vision of apocalyptic and demonic worlds are the same thing, and that thing also beautiful and ‘true.’ His theory of literature, we could say, is profoundly dialectical, encapsulating radically opposed ideas about the nature of literature. The opposing tendencies in question are highly political, and, like his Blake criticism, his literary theory eschews political identities and thereby transcends the level of the history of partisan ideas.

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Like Blake’s poetry, the whole of literature is a source of authority in society, and for Frye this authority, like that of Blake’s poetry, was a real power in society in his lifetime. Once again, however, literature is one element within a yet greater authority, that authority being the university.

5 Work and Leisure: Frye on the Individual in Society

Frye’s theory of education begins with the humanist conception of education, which can be seen as a focus for diverse figures. Overlooking the considerable differences between Arnold and Newman, differences which would dissuade many thinkers from speaking of the two within the same context, he associates this line of thinking with them, while also referring to both as ‘liberals.’ Though T.S. Eliot is better characterized as a social conservative, he espouses much the same view of education, and for this reason, despite the very obvious differences between them, Eliot can be spoken of in the same breath as Arnold and Newman (WE, 269). Introducing the humanist conception of education, Frye discusses the distinction between labour and leisure with reference to Plato, though he is also prepared to read the story of Adam and Eve in terms of the opposition. ‘Plato divides knowledge into two levels:’ he observes, ‘an upper level of theoretical knowledge …, which unites itself to permanent ideas or forms, and a lower level of practical knowledge, whose function is to embody these forms or ideas on the level of physical life’ (WE, 265). In his view the humanist conception of education, developed in the Renaissance period, ‘envisaged a roughly Platonic society on two levels’ (WE, 268), the upper level of which is labour free: On the lower level were the producers and artisans, the workers and tradesmen, and those who were concerned with the practical and technical arts. On the upper level was an aristocracy or leisure class, freed from the necessity of contributing to social production. (ibid.)

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For humanists, education is the process whereby the ruling class is trained in the arts of leadership: The function of education, on this higher social level, was to transform a leisure class into a responsible ruling class, trained in the arts of war and peace, the knowledge of Plato’s guards and of his philosopher-king. (ibid.)

Frye contrasts this theory of education with late nineteenth-century left-wing conceptions of society which challenged this humanist view of education. The new conception of society ‘regarded the relation of the upper to the lower level of society as essentially predatory and parasitic’ (ibid.). ‘In its fully developed form,’ he explains, ‘society would be identical with productive society: it would consist entirely of workers and producers’ (ibid.). He associates this shift in thinking with Carlyle, Ruskin, and in particular William Morris, who provides us with the most vivid picture of the desirable society where liberal education has been demoted: In Morris’s ideal world of the future, everybody is engaged in cultivating the minor arts of carving and drawing. They also do a certain amount of heavier work but the sense of reflection, of contemplation, of the whole speculative side of education, is quite deliberately minimised in Morris’s vision. (WE, 501)

Those three thinkers, however, are in Frye’s view not realistic about working conditions, the nature of what labour produces, or the larger political significance of hard work. Carlyle might almost seem to be guilty of idealizing work, though ‘drudgery, that is, servile, exploited, and alienated work, is not what he means by work’ (ENC, 314). Ruskin, similarly, adopts a highly critical view of work while identifying it as the most important value in life. Machine production makes man in its image, turning men into machines. ‘Such pseudo-work,’ Frye explains, ‘illustrates two interrelated social facts: that the process of mechanizing human labour is a form of penal servitude, and that its product is therefore bound to be both ugly and unnecessary’ (ibid.). In his view ‘Morris took over Ruskin’s method and reversed it’ (ENC, 315): He began with purely aesthetic judgments about the hideousness of most Victorian industrial products, and in attempting to replace at least some of

Work and Leisure 63 them with better-designed work he saw increasingly the social, then the moral, and finally the political significance of what he was doing. (ibid.)

Frye also speaks of the demise of the set-up whereby leisure and work are represented by different social classes, but also comments that ‘the old class habits keep persisting’ (NFR, 46). Reminding us of his low view of the purely aesthetic approach to literature, Frye associates leisure without work with aestheticism: It has puzzled many people that it is possible for someone, the commandant of a Nazi death camp, for example, to have a cultivated taste for the arts and still be what he is. It is possible because the response to the arts can also exist on an aesthetic level, of the sort indicated by Wilde’s term ‘beautiful,’ where they are objects to be admired or valued or possessed. (ibid.)

Similarly, he takes a low view of work divorced from leisure: work bereft of an educated imagination is drudgery. ‘The more alienating and less creative it becomes,’ he explains, ‘the more completely it becomes an observance of time, a clock-punching and clock-watching servitude’ (NFR, 46). Frye is interested in moving beyond the humanist and nineteenth-century proto-socialist positions, while preserving something of both of them. He articulates a dialectical theory of education and work which goes beyond these two opposed points of view. The notion that education is the process whereby the ruling class is trained in the arts of leadership is clearly a broadly conservative one. Morris’s vision of the perfect society is equally clearly a radical vision of the just society. Conservatives have a theory of education; radicals have a theory of work. Douglas Long and Graham Good discuss Frye’s liberalism in connection with the term ‘humanism,’ but these commentators fail to acknowledge that in the context of his writings on education Frye associates humanism exclusively with political conservatism.1 It is true that Frye unequivocally defines himself as a ‘humanist’ in his Preface to On Education (WE, 599), but I would argue that when doing so, he is only speaking of one half of what is a composite identity based on the dialectic. Once again, his combination of dialectically opposed theories points to a highly individual theory which is beyond conservative and radical sympathies, and, as such, is suggestive of a set of dialectical ideas which transcend the ordinary history of ideas and may be considered post-partisan.

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When discussing education and work, Frye assimilates liberals into the conservative fold. In his view, what characterizes liberals and conservatives alike is an interest in the leisure and/or ruling class. However, liberalism is a theory which argues for the prioritization of human freedom in society, and in this sense Frye’s dialectical thinking is not just suprahistorical and beyond radical and conservative sympathies but is also ‘liberal.’ It is, however, a special form of liberalism that he advocates. As I shall explain towards the end of my exposition in this chapter, for Frye equality and fraternity are every bit as important as freedom, and therefore it is a greatly expanded liberalism that he argues for. Frye on Education When discussing the experience of education, Frye felicitously juxtaposes the images of the Lord’s Day and Jesus’ Lenten sojourn in the wilderness. The Christian calendar begins with a day of leisure, and he sees an analogy between the Lord’s Day and the experience of being a university student and postponing one’s taking on the extra-university responsibilities of life. A parallel with Lent also suggests itself: he compares Jesus’ withdrawal into the wilderness with a period of study. For Frye education is genuine leisure, but ‘the elements of temptation and distraction are always there’ (NFR, 369). The university is composed of two parts, humanities and sciences (WE, 50), and during different historical periods the fortunes of the two aspects of the university vary: in one period we see the ascendancy of science, in another the ascendancy of the humanities (WE, 50–2). Mathematics represents the centre of the natural sciences, and English literature and language – owing to a considerable extent to the visionary power of literature that we considered in chapter 4 – the centre of the humanities (WE, 72). According to Frye, ‘science is primarily the study of the order of nature, the world that is there’; and ‘the form of the world man wants to live in is revealed by the form of the world he keeps trying to build, the world of cities and gardens and libraries and highways that is a world of art’ (WE, 274). However, we have to be careful with the inference we draw from this. Education is concerned with ‘the world that man lives in and the world he wants to live in,’ but ‘it would … be nonsense to say that the former was the business of the sciences and the latter the business of the humanities and the arts’ (ibid.). In Frye’s view ordinary society is characterized by two ‘vices’:

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indifference and anxiety. Indifference is ‘the feeling that one’s immediate concern is separable from the total human concern – that a man can be an island entire of himself’ (WE, 276). Anxiety is bound up with aggressive social mythologies. If charges of monolithic structuring are sometimes brought against Frye, his rejection of such thinking is unequivocal. ‘We have anxiety,’ he states, ‘when a society seizes on one myth and attempts to pound the whole of knowledge and truth into a structure conforming to it’ (WE, 277). The best way of understanding education is to focus on the fact that education promulgates answering virtues which are intellectual virtues. Science promulgates the virtue of detachment, ‘the objective consideration of evidence, the drawing of rational conclusions from evidence, the rejection of all devices for cooking or manipulating the evidence’ (WE, 274). The arts encourage concern, the negation of anxiety, involving human factors not relevant to science: ‘emotion, value, aesthetic standards, the portrayal of objects of desire and hope and dream as realities, the explicit preference of life to death, of growth to petrifaction, of freedom to enslavement’ (WE, 274– 5). The problems stem once more from dichotomy instead of unity: indifference is clearly detachment without concern, and anxiety is concern without detachment. Detachment is therefore concerned detachment, concern detached concern. It is, however, what the arts and sciences form together that is most important. A university education, in Frye’s view, represents the culmination of a three-stage process, where each stage involves ‘a conservative and a radical aspect’ (WE, 145), and ‘the imagination’ represents a third ‘faculty.’ In the initial stage of education ‘the consolidating or conservative power is memory’ (ibid.), and the corresponding radical element something called ‘sense,’ his term for ‘the power of apprehending what is presented to us by experience, the recognition of things as they are’ (ibid.). The imagination is a third faculty involved in the education process, but at this early stage it operates on the level of ‘fancy,’ defined by Frye as ‘a stylizing and modifying of the actual conditions of the child’s life, a kind of primitive realism’ (WE, 147). Memory is concerned with content; sense with structure. In his view ‘the natural shape of elementary education is deductive’ (WE, 146). As significant patterns emerge out of facts, the student begins to exercise his ‘sense.’ The radical and conservative dimensions of education are ‘more conceptual’ (WE, 152) in the secondary phase of education. In this phase education circles around the nature of symbolism: ‘In the secondary phase the radical side of the mind wants to know what good or what use

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an idea or institution is, whether we could get along without it, what it has to say for itself even if generally accepted. The conservative side wants to know why the idea or institution exists, why it has been accepted if wrong, what significance is in the fact that it has existed’ (WE, 153). The purpose of this phase of education is political: ‘the formation of a critical intelligence, the intelligence of a responsible citizen in a complex modern democracy’ (ibid.). In this phase Frye’s sympathy lies with the conservative side of education, for he associates it with the suspension of disbelief and the radical one with Philistinism. This phase sees a growing sympathy between the imagination and the conservative aspect of learning on account of the fact that the radical dimension becomes militant and can be anti-imaginative. Now the radical aspect is fascinated by the present, whereas the conservative side finds the present thoroughly inadequate. The imagination is maturing in certain respects during this phase: ‘The imagination is no longer fanciful, and it is not yet a fully constructive power, but moves most freely among the monuments of its own magnificence. It is bound intellectually to tradition, and emotionally to nostalgia’ (ibid.). Before turning to Frye’s theoretical account of tertiary education, we might stand back from his theoretical work and consider the social context of his thinking on education. In some contexts he produces an unflattering picture of the twentieth-century university every bit as pessimistic as the late Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Beginning with the development of universal education, Frye argues that education had been anti-democratic in that it had sought to keep class distinctions on a permanent basis. Universal education, then, was a profoundly democratic cause. ‘For once in his long, stupid, muddled history,’ he argues ironically, ‘man could be reasonably sure that in adopting universal education he was heading in the right direction’ (WE, 318). However, in his view the development of universal education resulted in some unforeseen changes in society. It came with the notion that ‘there ought to be a period of life, between puberty and voting age, in which young people should be, to some extent, segregated from what is going on in the world’ (WE, 408). For Frye, the conception of the ‘adolescent’ was a construct dreamed up by society in a spirit of benevolence, but the end result of it was ‘a kind of benevolent segregation’ (WE, 319). Furthermore, the notion of the adolescent was not simply a mind-set. In his view this protective instinct also led to changes in the education system in the United States, essentially a ‘dumbing-down’ process. In the 1920s and ’30s, he argues, ‘optimism combined with the

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lazy good-natured anti-intellectualism of American life to produce a kind of education that prolonged the play period and postponed all serious study as long as possible’ (WE, 319). Citing Robert Hutchins, Frye comments that a good deal of American university education was indeed a ‘vast playpen designed to keep young people off the streets, and, more important, off the labour market’ (ibid.). According to Frye, his generation had created a ‘social proletariat,’ in the Marxist sense of ‘a body of people in society who are excluded from the benefits that their own labour entitles them to’ (WE, 329), who represent a group analogous to that of women in the nineteenth century. A social policy oriented towards the weakening of the class structure served to develop a new kind of social stratification. In his view it was this process of segregation which led to student protest in the late ’60s in North America. For Frye, the 1957 Sputnik led Americans to the conclusion that education in the United States had to be improved if the Cold War was to be won. The new recognition on the part of the political establishment of the importance of education in the United States encouraged students to conclude that their presence in society was of the greatest importance, that they ‘were fully participating in society by being students’ (WE, 320), and that consequently they should not be treated like children and segregated. Unlike those associated with the New Left, Frye did not support the aims of the Students for a Democratic Society or the form the protests took. But he did sympathize with the larger situation of the students. He admitted that teachers and an entire older generation had consigned students to a life bereft of a social function. Frye’s writings, then, provide us with an uncompromising account of the state of the twentieth-century North American university. However, in his writings on education his focus is not on the state of institutions. ‘My own view of an ideal system of education is a Utopian one,’ he states in ‘Education and the Rejection of Reality’ (WE, 426), and in ‘The Developing Imagination’ he emphasizes that the tertiary phase of education is ‘more of an ideal than a fact’ (WE, 158). In this phase the conservative impulse is the student’s awareness of society, ‘the knowledge of its institutions, conventions, and attitudes’ (ibid.). ‘Over against this,’ he writes, ‘in the ideally educated mind, is the awareness that the middle-class mid-twentieth-century North American society we are living in is not the real form of human society, but the transient appearance of that society’ (ibid.). The radical aspect, then, is concerned with a world of desire. For Frye, the world of ordinary perception is largely an illu-

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sion. ‘For one thing,’ he argues, ‘it changes very rapidly … If Canada in 1962 is a different society from the Canada of 1942, it can’t be real society, but only a temporary appearance of real society’ (EICT, 492–3). ‘The real human society,’ he asserts, is the total body of human achievement in the arts and in the sciences. The arts are perhaps more concerned with what humanity has done, the sciences perhaps more concerned with what it is about to do, but the two together form the permanent model of civilization which our present society approximates. (WE, 158)

In the final phase of education ‘the imagination moves over to the exploring or radical side of the mind, and comes into its own’ (ibid.): It is now a fully developed constructive power: it is informed by what Whitehead calls the habitual vision of greatness, and its activity in the world around it is to realize whatever it can of that vision. It operates in society in much the same way, working from conception to realization, that the artist works on his art, which is what Blake meant by saying that the poetic genius of man is the real man. (ibid.)

It is conventional, Frye argues, to think of education in society in connection with the human body, but if it was once possible to associate a leisure class in society with ‘the brain, with its eyes and ears’ (WE, 501), a favourite conceit of humanists, that analogy no longer applies. Rather, we should associate mental power with ‘the informing vision of action,’ a key principle of Frye’s: ‘What really occupies the place of the brain, the seat of judgment, the ultimate source of authority, is a kind of informing vision above action’ (WE, 502). The Unity of Education and Work, and Frye’s Liberalism How does this understanding of education combine with work? Needless to say, education and work represent a necessary unity in Frye’s view. The radical attitude to education, like the humanist one, is based on the idea that leisure and work belong to different classes. For humanists, leisure is the preserve of the dominant class; work that of the working class. For radicals work would be the proper activity for a class which ideally would include every member of society; leisure consists

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of the pursuits of a decadent class that should be squeezed out of society as quickly as possible. In Frye’s dialectical, suprahistorical, and postpartisan view, work and leisure should not be associated with different kinds of individuals or classes; indeed, in Frye’s view, his own time is one in which leisure and work are of almost equal importance at the individual level: Today, the machinery of production appears to be steadily declining in the proportion of time and attention that it requires. I am not speaking of automation, which is not a cause but an effect of this process: I mean simply that the proportion of work to leisure which according to the Book of Genesis was established by God himself on a ratio of six to one is rapidly changing in the direction a ratio of one to one … We appear, then, to be entering a period in which work and leisure are not embodied in different classes, but should be thought of as two aspects, nearly equal in importance, of the same life. Every citizen may not be only a Martha, troubled about many things, but a Mary who has chosen the better part [Luke 10:38– 42], and the question, ‘What does he know?’ becomes as relevant to defining one’s social function as the question, ‘What does he do?’ (WE, 271)

But what ultimately interests Frye is not a life in which leisure and work remain an evenly balanced dichotomy; rather, education and work in society should ideally create a group or class embodying the unity of work and leisure. They embody that unity because they are in possession of the vision conferred by education, and because, when they work, they act in the light of vision. Their labours could be summed up in the phrase ‘visionful work.’ (If we had to label this group, we would have to class it an ‘imaginative class.’) For example, a social worker trying to work in Toronto obviously has all his or her activity motivated by an inner vision of a healthier, cleaner, less neurotic, and less prejudiced Toronto than the one which he or she is actually working in. Without that vision, the whole point of the work being done would be lost. (WE, 502)

Frye’s argument is suggestive of a secular version of the Golden Rule. Just as the Golden Rule asks the individual to act in accordance with an ideal rather than the social norm, so a university education sets up a high standard for the working individual.

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This model is our cultural environment, as distinct from our social environment. The educated man is the man who tries to live in his social environment according to the standards of his cultural environment. (WE, 158)

Frye believes in maximizing both work and leisure in society so that everybody acquires as much of both as possible. Work should be a part of one’s younger years. He speaks approvingly of students who ‘pick up for themselves various interests which involve them with the community around them’ (WE, 427). At the same time, he wants adults to constantly return to university. ‘I should like to see,’ he states, ‘all educational institutions open for people to return to as frequently as possible in adult life’ (ibid.). At times he speaks as if a worker could acquire a vision of society without having been exposed to university education: Every person with any function in society at all will have some kind of ideal vision of that society in the light of which he operates … One can hardly imagine in fact any professional person not having such a social model – a world of health for the doctor or of justice for the judge – nor would such a social vision be confined to the professions. (WE, 174)

Of course, were Frye to take this line of argumentation too far, he would end up with nothing more than a radical view of society: work is all society needs. For this reason he almost always insists on the connection between social vision and formal education: I suggest that the simplest way to characterize that informing vision of society is to identify it with the university itself, with that total body of arts and sciences which, in their totality, are the real form of society and into which the student is initiated. (WE, 175)

Frye’s theory of work and education, then, is dialectical, suprahistorical, and post-partisan, but to this sequence of descriptive terms we must add the word ‘liberal.’ Indeed, within the context of education and work, Frye’s dialectical thinking and liberalism are one and the same.2 In his writings on education Frye considers the conclusion that human freedom is the terminus ad quem of visionful work: We cannot struggle to achieve a better society without a vision of what such a society might be, and it is only the arts and sciences, the forms that the human intellect and imagination have achieved, that can provide such a

Work and Leisure 71 vision. But freedom exists in the vision itself, not in the means of reaching it, because the goal to be attained in the future is, in the intellect and imagination, already there. (WE, 403)

One could be forgiven for concluding that for Frye freedom is purely a question of the possession of vision rather than the process whereby it informs action, but what Frye argues in this passage is that freedom is a matter of visionful work, whether or not one lives to see one’s hopes realized. The value of our efforts does not depend on results; acting in the light of vision is an end in itself. He is deeply sceptical about our attempts to judge the value of our own lives, and, significantly, the clearest articulation of such considerations is in his occasional religious writings, such as a Baccalaureate sermon from 1967: If you look forward to the future, with the expectation of identifying your lives with a definite body of work achieved, you are doomed to the bitterest disappointment. The future is too slippery to rely on: other things over which you have no control frustrate your intentions and twist everything you do into unrecognizable shapes. The morrow takes thought for the things of itself. If you go into business, your achievement may be only to adulterate goods and raise prices; if you go into politics, your achievement may be only to compromise your principles and raise taxes … What you get from your college education, ultimately, is something that cannot be directly taught. It is really a vision of society, a vision derived from the best that humanity has done: the concepts of philosophy, the imagination of the arts, the accuracy and the discoveries of the sciences. This vision is not itself knowledge but a practical wisdom, which you take with you into society, which you apply as a criterion to society, and which is the source of your own expertise and special abilities. This means that what is important about your life is not that you should achieve something, but that you should manifest something. For example, a social worker does her work with a vision, in her mind, of a more just and equitable, a more adequately privileged, a cleaner and less neurotic Toronto than the Toronto she is working in. She does not feed herself on the delusion that her efforts will bring this better Toronto into existence in the future. But the light of that vision shines through what she does, and it is that light, not the consequences of what she does, that makes her work effective. (NFR, 285–6)

The fact that Frye associates freedom with education and work means that his thinking in this area is ‘liberal’ in a specific sense. In his A Life of

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One’s Own, David Kelley distinguishes between negative and positive freedom, negative freedom being the focus of classical liberalism.3 In that liberal theory, it is freedom from coercion which constitutes human liberty. (As we shall see in the next chapter, Frye thinks of the liberty of laissez-faire as the freedom of the ‘natural man.’) But later liberals, Kelley argues, conceive of freedom as freedom from exposure to social evils, including all forms of privation. The latter, as Kelley explains, are connected to welfare rights, which exponents of negative freedom view as coercion. Frye argues that freedom is dependent on education and work, thereby distancing himself from classical liberalism and suggesting that he belongs to the company of ‘new liberals’ such as John Dewey and Louis D. Brandesi in the United States and Thomas Hill Green and L.T. Hobhouse in England, who, viewing freedom as positive, believed that education and work, as well as other factors, are prerequisites of freedom in society. When speaking of the university in itself, Frye refutes the idea that it is political in nature: The people in the university are citizens: they have the same concerns and commitments as anyone else. But the university itself stands for something different: it is not trying directly to create a certain kind of society. It is not conservative, not radical, not reactionary, nor is it a façade for any of those attitudes. Its goal is liberal, in the sense that we speak of a liberal education, but that is not a liberalism in any concerned or political sense, with however small an l. (WE, 401–2)

But the combination of work and education, fostering freedom in society, can only be seen as political and, more specifically, liberal ‘in a concerned sense’ when placed within the context of the history of ideas. The social group pictured by Frye, however, enjoys not just liberty but also equality and fraternity. In his view equality is ‘the conviction that a social function is essential to every human being’s life, and that to deprive any individual of a social function is a kind of murder’ (NFMC, 278). Freedom is ‘the power to do what one has learned to do’ (NFMC, 280); what Frye has in mind is not freedom from external compulsion but the internal compulsion which results from practice and leads to the state where, in Yeats’s phrase, the dancer cannot be distinguished from the dance. And ‘the genuine fraternity, the genuine social group, is a group united by some kind of common knowledge or skill’ (ibid.). Following Arnold and going some way beyond him, Frye associates free-

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dom, equality, and fraternity with the middle class, working class, and aristocracy respectively (ENC, 320), and, in his view, the imaginative class embodies the values of all social classes. Because its members are possessed of a vision of society, they are free. Because they work, their vision informing that work, they are equal. And because the vision in question is a shared vision, their society is fraternal. Frye’s dialectical thinking about education and work represents a contribution to liberal theory, then, but serves as a comprehensive correction of it. His liberalism is not simply a theory of freedom but a theory of all three revolutionary values. It points to what we might term a greatly expanded liberalism, that being a liberalism which recognizes not only the inseparability of education and work, but the interpenetrating nature of freedom, equality, and fraternity. Is there a danger that such a conception is conducive to elitism? In a Convocation Address delivered at the University of British Columbia, he speaks of the ‘real elite’: They include the quiet self-effacing people who are busy teaching school or fixing teeth or saving money to send their own children to university, who sit through endless dull committees and board meetings because it’s a public service to do so: in short, the people who devote as much of their lives as possible to keeping up the standard of culture and civilization, both for themselves and for their communities. (WE, 181)

Though we are still in the secular realm, this group is suggestive of Protestantism’s Invisible Church: they are ‘an invisible group, and nobody but God knows who they all are’ (ibid.). (Like Newman before him, Frye finds it impossible to keep religious questions out of his meditations on secular concerns, education especially. Speaking of ‘St. Paul’s exemplar of the Christian in his external relations,’ Newman argues that ‘the school of the world seems to send out living copies of this typical excellence with greater success than the Church. At this day the “gentleman” is the creation, not of Christianity, but of civilization.’4 Just as Newman came to the conclusion that formal education rather than the church proved capable of encouraging the development of aspects of Christian sensibility, so Frye, an equally religious thinker, concludes that a secular community reproduces many of the characteristics of the ideal Christian one.) The reader might object that Frye has produced a deeply

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conservative picture of a hierarchical society; that his educated and working minority is indicative of a temperament every bit as conservative as Eliot’s. Two specific objections might be raised. Firstly, Frye’s group is a dominant class which figuratively can only be located at the top of society. Secondly, the community we can trust can only be a group on the margins of society, who are disempowered and kept in check, their isolation the price they pay for their integrity. However, Frye’s elite is not a privileged class as such; rather it is an intermediate group between a ruling class and a working class. We might profitably contrast Frye’s elite with John Adams’s ‘natural aristocracy,’ for example. Adams’s aristocracy relies on a stratified society: his ideal society consists of ‘natural aristocrats,’ defined by Adams as those who influence at least one other citizen, and the rest, who are influenced by the aristocrats. Frye’s theory relies on no such demarcation. It is not the case that for every worker in possession of a vision of society there must be a worker without that vision. Therefore, there is nothing to stop Frye’s group from becoming a majority. On occasions he speaks of the possibility of this minority growing into a majority. ‘Society depends heavily for its well-being on the handful of people who are imaginative … If the number became a majority,’ he goes on, ‘we should be living in a very different world, for it would be a world that we should then have the vision and the power to construct’ (WE, 159). Furthermore, the fact that Frye’s group are not to be associated exclusively with the periphery does not mean that they should be identified solely with the centre of society. In ‘The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century,’ Frye discusses the history of theories of education, and towards the end of the essay he turns his attention to Arnold’s view of the significance of an educated elite in society: We notice that the more conservative a writer is, the more inclined he is to locate spiritual authority in the middle of actual society, in the place of greatest prestige and prominence. The more radical he is, the more inclined he is to locate it in an opposition, an alien or even excluded group. (ENC, 283)

The model is one that is suggestive of an either/or opposition: one identifies with either a sociable centre or an isolated periphery. But in Frye’s view Arnold collapsed the opposition: ‘Something in Arnold – perhaps the Romantic poet in him – realizes that the centre is the place of the

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greatest isolation’ (ibid.). And in the passage that follows, Frye clarifies the point beautifully: The argument of Culture and Anarchy is to the effect that what is of greatest cultural value, such as a university or the established church, is central to society and demands to be placed at the centre, in the position of Carlyle’s intrinsic symbol. Society itself presents a conflict of class interests, and culture for Arnold operates like law in Burke or doctrine in Newman, as a harmonizing principle creating a new kind of order out of this conflict. Those who support it have to begin by isolating themselves from class conflict, which means isolating themselves from the present structure of society: ‘[W]ithin each of these classes there are a certain number of aliens, if we may so call them, – persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection.’ (ibid.)

Frye’s educated minority and Arnold’s aliens are the same group, and our inference can only be that the educated minority, inhabiting a space which is both centre and periphery, are both radical and conservative at once.5 Conclusion In Frye’s view, leisure is a crucially important aspect of society. For him, leisure is not dandyism or idleness but the cultivation of a vision of the real society which is the goal of work. At the same time, work is a meaningful activity and not a burden best left to ‘lower orders.’ Work should not be drudgery but a manifestation of the vision of leisure possessed by the educated citizen or worker with a social function. His attitude to education and work, then, like his attitude to literature, represents dialectical and suprahistorical thinking. And, as in other areas of thought, his theory of leisure and work eschews conservative and radical attitudes to society and may be viewed as post-partisan. I have also commented on the fact that Frye’s thinking about work and leisure represents his own landmark contribution to liberal theory. (In chapter 7, when discussing his dialectical view of Scripture, I shall argue that his view of the Bible represents an articulation of his Protestantism, analogous to his liberal thinking.) As we shall see in the next chapter, Frye thinks of education and work as a power strong enough to have a dramatic effect on history in his own time, specifically within the context of the Cold War.

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Taking a step back from Frye’s career, our consideration of his secular thinking has brought us as planned to the three ideals of the French Revolution. Were Frye’s trajectory to stop here, what I have said would be highly paradoxical in nature: Frye moves beyond Left and Right, yet the terminus ad quem of this thinking is the ideals of the French Revolution. As we shall see in chapter 7, however, Frye completes his dialectical, suprahistorical, and post-partisan thinking by turning from the secular world to the Christian Bible. With this shift in focus he completes his move beyond the two sides of the political divide by complementing his dialectical views of each of his individual concerns with an overarching dialectical manoeuvre.

6 Freedom and Equality: Frye’s Political Philosophy

Writing against the backdrop of the Cold War, Frye’s political thinking is characterized by a desire to move beyond the stage where opposing political goals are understood to be mutually exclusive to one which is dialectical, suprahistorical, and post-partisan, where those goals are revealed to be compatible and simultaneously achievable. He argues the case for a political program which gives equal weight to equality and freedom, the priorities of Left and Right respectively. Before focusing upon Frye’s dialectical political thinking, I shall build up the conceptual background to it. I shall begin with an account of Frye’s view of the Cold War, speaking of the possibility of ‘hot war’ in the second half of the twentieth century, before moving on to his unequivocal rejection of that dreadful prospect. I shall then proceed to the centrepiece of this chapter, which comprises a discussion of his dialectical political thinking, focused upon a primary revolution in political culture. War To Frye’s mind, the Fascist and Communist world views are articulated most clearly in the works of Spengler and Marx respectively. Spengler’s central argument, which we have glanced at within the context of literary criticism, is that all cultures go through the phases of ‘rise, growth, decline, and fall’ (NFMC, 266): Spengler sees history as a series of quasi-organic developments or “cultures,” which are at first agricultural and feudal, then urban and oligarchic,

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and finally become industrial and totalitarian. The last stage is one of huge cities, nomadic population, profiteering and dictatorships, mass wars, the impoverishing of agriculture and the exhaustion of the arts, and the growth of technology. (NFMC, 248)

For this reason, it is always possible to anticipate to an extent the spirit of the times to come. With Napoleon our culture reached a point in its history corresponding to the time of Alexander the Great in Classical culture. What the future holds is warfare between gigantic power blocks, one of which will eventually gain the upper hand: We’re about a century later than Napoleon, so we’re about where Classical civilization was around two hundred years before Christ, when the great empires, Macedonia, Rome, and Carthage, were fighting for supremacy. What’s ahead of us is something like the Roman Empire. One of our great nations will grow to a world empire – Spengler hopes it will be Germany. Cecil Rhodes the empire builder is typical, Spengler says, of the kind of Caesars we’ll be getting in the next few centuries. (NFMC, 267)

The rationale for Nazism is that at such times in history one nation must place the world under martial law. ‘The Rome of the future,’ he goes on, outlining Spengler’s thesis, ‘will be whatever nation has enough organization, discipline, leadership, ethnic integrity, and historical sense to impose its will on the rest of the world’ (NFMC, 248–9). Communism seems to derive from a more linear conception of history, where the dialectic which is at work throughout history moves things forward. In The Decline of the West, Spengler wishes to emphasize the fact that the Industrial Revolution and the modern world are a repetition of previous developments. By contrast, Marx focuses on the ‘uniqueness of the same event’ (NFMC, 249). For Marx, ‘productive power’ (ibid.) supports the class system, for it determines that there are producing classes and leisure classes. The important thing about the Industrial Revolution is that it brought in ‘a technique for producing new inventions at will’ (ibid.). The effect of the Industrial Revolution, accordingly, was to intensify exploitation to such an extent that the dispossessed are virtually identical with society itself. ‘Such a dispossessed society could, by seizing its own producing power,’ he states, ‘recover its balance in a revolutionary act that would not only destroy its class structure but put an end to history as we know it, history as we know it being essentially the mutation of class struggles’ (ibid.).

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In Frye’s analysis these two movements represent aberrant phases of state development. Nations begin the modern period as ‘relatively small’ (ibid.). The inevitable next phase is the geopolitical one, in which whole continents are the agents. The period of colonial expansion which followed on from the Industrial Revolution was a ‘transitional phase’ between the first two of these stages. The final stage of this development is alluded to as a ‘world federation’ (NFMC, 250). ‘What is now taking shape,’ he explains, ‘is a new “geopolitical” configuration, in which the effective nations are huge land masses extending over most of a continent’ (ibid.). This framework allows him to advance his characterization of Fascism and Communism. (Frye possesses an outstanding capacity for moving at a level of historical generalization that simplifies, but simplifies usably and even fruitfully, without lapsing into an ossifying or evaporating generality, something which is exemplified in the following quotation, and in all the subsequent ones in this chapter.) The nations that went Fascist, we notice, were those which were too late to compete in the struggle for colonies, and too early to succeed in transforming themselves into continental powers, as Germany and Japan tried so hard to do. The nations that went Communist were those that had inherited vast geopolitical resources and territories exploited by a corrupt and demoralized administration. Thus Fascism is evidently an aberrant phase of the transition from colonial to geopolitical power, and Communism similarly appears to be an aberrant phase of the transition from geopolitical conflict to a world federation. (ibid.)

In a Communist world warfare would be unending. ‘A little study of the relations of Russia with other Communist countries makes it clear … that in a completely Communist world there would be as much war, as sharp boundaries, and as constant suspicion and intrigue as ever. The terrible clarity of this fact has wiped out nearly all the intellectual sympathy with Communism in the democracies’ (NFMC, 254). But Frye is robustly critical of laissez-faire as well as Fascism and Communism. He views the great ideologies of the twentieth century as parodies of the Judeo-Christian religions. He has in mind an elaborate framework of reference which ties in those ideologies with the major religions of the West: From the religious point of view, Fascism in its pure form of German Nazism looks very like an atheistic parody of Judaism, preserving its

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sense of ethnic purity and its expectancy of a temporal Messiah but throwing away its God. From the religious point of view, Communism looks very like an atheistic parody of Roman Catholicism, preserving its sense of an irrefutable and world-conquering dialectic and setting up at Moscow an imitation of its central infallible church, but, again, throwing away its God. It is possible that laissez faire, the doctrine of the individual liberty of the natural man, is similarly a godless parody of Protestantism. (NFMC, 239)

Like George Orwell’s, Frye’s political sensibility was deeply influenced by the work of the American popular political theorist James Burnham.1 Although he rarely acknowledges it in his writing, his viewpoint borrows from and criticizes Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. Published in 1941, Burnham’s study argues that an entirely new political ideology, managerialism, is on the march, and that laissez-faire is slowly disappearing from the world. Fascism and Communism are both examples of the new phenomenon, but crucially he also believes that the U.S. is not untouched by its development. New Dealism, while being superior to German Fascism and Russian Communism, is another example of managerialism, albeit a ‘primitive’ version. Burnham’s view is that it is of the utmost importance to reject this form of managerialism and re-embrace laissez-faire. In ‘The Church: Its Relation to Society,’ Frye refers to the ‘distortion of emphasis’ (NFR, 264) in The Managerial Revolution. Perhaps he read Orwell’s review of Burnham’s The Struggle for the World. In that review Orwell comments that for all the strengths of the argument of Burnham’s earlier book, ‘his picture of the world is always slightly distorted.’ What Orwell objects to is Burnham’s fatalism. ‘The Managerial Revolution … seemed to me a good description of what is actually happening in various parts of the world, i.e. the growth of societies neither capitalist nor Socialist, and organised more or less on the lines of a caste system. But Burnham went on to argue that because this was happening, nothing else could happen, and the new, tightly-knit totalitarian state must be stronger than the chaotic democracies.’2 Frye agrees with Burnham up to a point: Fascism and Communism represent two types of managerial revolution; but he differs from Burnham on the subject of New Dealism. For Burnham, it is because laissez-faire has been abandoned in favour of different types of ‘statism’ that the managerial revolution has been able to take hold in the U.S. as well as Europe and

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elsewhere. But for Frye New Dealism and other similar movements represent a crucial struggle against managerialism. Using the language of James Burnham in a democratic context, Frye argues that laissez faire brings about ‘managerial revolution.’ ‘Many Americans still believe,’ he argues, ‘that laissez-faire is the economic aspect of democracy, but there is a growing realization that laissez-faire by itself does not lead to democracy, but to oligarchy, and thence to managerial dictatorship’ (NFMC, 251). Moreover, laissez-faire is, paradoxically, conducive to Communism. In the following passage he explains how both Fascism and Communism are latent forces within democratic societies: Democracy attempts to contain its class conflict, and prevent the separating tendencies – oligarchy and pressure-group organization – from making a breach of the social contract. From the democratic point of view, Fascism is an oligarchic conspiracy against the open-class system, deriving its real power from the big oligarchs and its mass support from would-be oligarchs, the ‘independent’ (i.e., unsuccessful) entrepreneurs. Communism is the corresponding conspiracy at the other end, addressing itself to those most likely to feel that society in its present form will permanently exclude them from its benefits. (NFMC, 252)

The same point is crystallized in ‘Tenets of Modern Culture.’ Laissezfaire is potential Fascism and potential Communism: The axioms and postulates of laissez-faire … are anti-Christian, and lead in the direction, not of democracy, but of managerial dictatorship. Such a dictatorship may be established in either of two ways: (a) through the consolidation of the power of the oligarchy (Fascism); (b) through the seizure of power by a revolutionary leadership established within the trade unions (Communism). (NFMC, 238)

In ‘Trends in Modern Culture,’ an essay which grew out of his work for the Culture Commission of the United Church and was published in 1952, Frye contemplates the possibility of America becoming Fascist or Communist, and concludes it is the former possibility which is the greater danger: Fascism is ‘a more imminent domestic threat’ (NFMC, 253). He goes on:

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The unquestioned supremacy of civil over military power, and of public law over sealed orders, is of course a vital organ of democracy, and its functioning is greatly hampered by the essential nuisances of war. Unfortunately the Marxist claim that capitalism can in the long run only function under wartime conditions has not yet been disproved. The rise, both in power and in popularity, of a military autocracy and a secret police, and the standard features of wartime hysteria: purges, trials that are publicity stunts, and the use of frivolous political jockeying to protect the sin of bearing false witness – all these are signs of the possibility, however remote, of America’s becoming what the Soviet press asserts her to be now. (ibid.)

This prospect is nevertheless less likely than other possible futures. In a striking passage in ‘The Church: Its Relation to Society,’ Frye speaks of a possible communality of interest between the laissez-faire focused West and the Warsaw Pact which might lead to global tyranny. One of the great dangers in this current political world, he warns, is that the status quo will remain unchallenged: The defences of laissez-faire offered today usually assume that the political form of it is democracy. This is nonsense: its political form is an oligarchic dictatorship. Every amelioration of labour conditions, every limitation of the power of monopolies, every effort to make the oligarchy responsible to the community as a whole, has been forced out of laissezfaire by democracy, which has played a consistently revolutionary role against it. The Russians today interpret laissez-faire precisely as we do Communism, as a unified conspiracy to conquer the world emanating from a single nation, America having disposed of or absorbed all its rivals. We may feel that this is considerably oversimplified for propaganda purposes, that democracy in America has the oligarchy too well in hand to permit a repetition of the bid for power that produced Hitler. We may even feel that the Marxist ideal of the withering away of the state is closer to realization in America, for all the forces working against it, than it will ever be under Communism in Russia. Nevertheless, the Russian case contains part of the truth, even if it is the part that we prefer not to look at. The fear of the Russian people for America is a real fear with a real basis. It may however not be honestly shared by their rulers. It is good Marxist doctrine that despots are often inspired by the fear of their own subjects to make common cause with tyranny in other countries, and two anti-Russian Marxists may be cited as having raised this point. The essential identity of interest between the tendency to dictatorship in America and the achievement of it in Rus-

Freedom and Equality 83 sia has been stated, though with some distortion of emphasis, in James Burnham’s well-known book, The Managerial Revolution. (NFR, 264)

In addition to this, there is the danger of partial warfare and what that would lead to: Frye concludes his discussion of the dangers of managerialism with a nightmarish prospect, an image of the world desire rejects, partly inspired by Orwell’s 1984: How such a revolution could make its power absolute and permanent by a not-too-lethal form of permanent war is shown with great clarity in George Orwell’s terrible satire 1984, perhaps the definitive contemporary vision of hell. (NFR, 264–5)

However, the principal danger is that the two powers will engage in hot war with one another. ‘In my student days it was very generally accepted that socialism, whether of the type envisaged by Marx or by gradualists, represented a higher state of social evolution than capitalism, and that it was the duty of all right-thinking people to help in the general move to the next upward step’ (NFR, 101), Frye commented in ‘Repetitions of Jacob’s Dream,’ ‘given as an address at the National Gallery in Ottawa in connection with an exhibition entitled “Ladders to Heaven: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage”’ (NFR, 91). ‘However,’ he continues, ‘Communism established itself in largely preindustrial societies, and Communism and capitalism settled down to an adversary relationship’ (NFR, 101). Danger stems from the fact that both sides are deep in denial about the reality of this confrontation: One side says the world is divided between the democratic and the totalitarian state, and the other side says that it is divided between the socialist state and the tools of capitalist imperialism. We can get no further on that basis. (NFMC, 275)

Their inability to see the failings of their own systems means that both systems look forward to the spread of their system of governance throughout the world, especially in the lands where the opposing system has taken hold. Thus the two become ‘foreign dangers’ and threats to the indigenous way of life. Frye had described the Second World War as a ‘hideous necessity’: ‘A human covenant of blood,’ he states, ‘leads to a war of blood’ (NFR, 266). The struggle with Communism is a very different case in that it need

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not lead to such a ‘war of blood’; indeed the Cold War can be brought to an end through peaceful means. Nevertheless, the greatest danger facing the world is full-blown conflict between the democratic West and the Communist East, a ‘third world war’ (NFMC, 254). Frye, as we know, saw the new age as one in which ‘the effective nations are huge land masses extending over most of a continent’ (NFMC, 250), but weaponry was keeping up with the pace of other developments. ‘The development of long-range destructive weapons such as the atomic bomb,’ he explains, ‘is designed to make warfare on a full continental scale a military possibility’ (ibid.). Toward the end of the first section of ‘Trends in Modern Culture’ he focuses on this prospect in a passage which, in its incisive sketch of fundamental issues and in the dryly colloquial conditional clause with which it ends, reminds us of Orwell’s writings: If the struggle with Communism reaches the stage of a third world war, that war, like its predecessor, will have, to begin with, a right and a wrong side. The right side – ours – will derive its rightness, not from the value of what it fights for, but from the evil of what it fights against. War only destroys, and there is no good in war except in the destruction of evil. At the end of a war there is no good ready to replace the evil, but only a disorganized situation that a surviving power may be able to take some advantage of, if it is not too exhausted and has any idea what to do. (NFMC, 254)

Frye’s Anti-War Stance Needless to say, Frye is resolutely anti-war. His fundamental perception is that war is an enormous exercise in self-deception. Nations’ real enemies are always aspects of their own societies. On one occasion he objectifies the enemies within, and, in contrast to the totalitarian bureaucracies which loom up in Orwell’s writings, Frye focuses on the mob and demagogic politics, a focus which is suggestive of his specifically North American cultural context, with its history of McCarthyism, and legacy of Salem Puritanism and the original witch-hunts: We have outside us nations with different political philosophies, and we think of them as dangers, or even as enemies. But our more dangerous enemies, so far, are within. I spoke a moment ago of the difference between a mob and a democratic society. Our effective enemies are not foreign propagandists, but the hucksters and hidden persuaders and segregators and

Freedom and Equality 85 censors and hysterical witch-hunters and all the rest of the black guard who can only live as parasites on a gullible and misinformed mob. (NFMC, 133)

But what interests Frye is an even more insidious inimical force. Speaking at a Remembrance Day service on 11 November 1969, he reflects on the futility of war and the lies that it depends upon: It is significant that our memorial service commemorates two wars, both fought against the same country. In all wars, including all revolutions, the enemy becomes an imaginary abstraction of evil. Some German who never heard of us becomes a ‘Hun’; some demonstrator who is really protesting against his mother becomes a ‘Communist’; some policeman with a wife and family to support becomes a ‘fascist pig.’ We know that we are lying when we do this kind of thing, but we say it is tactically necessary and go on doing it. But because it is lying, it cannot create or accomplish anything, and so all wars, including all revolutions, take us back to the square one of frustrated aggression in which they began. Cuba is Communist today, South Africa has apartheid today, Africa and Asia seethe with unrest today, because the Spanish-American war, the Boer war, and all the imperialistic wars fought two generations ago have to be fought over again. (WE, 397– 8)

War is the result of our continually projecting our own ‘demons’ onto others. ‘This state of things will continue without change,’ he argues, ‘until we understand that our only real enemies are the legions of demons inside us’ (WE, 398). In his most revealing comment on this subject, Frye identifies the nature of the real ‘enemy.’ Marxism, he asserts, conceives of alienation in terms of ‘the feeling of the worker who is cheated out of most of the fruit of his labour by exploitation’ (NFMC, 11); but in bourgeois societies ‘the conception of alienation becomes psychological’ (NFMC, 12). What this means is that the conception returns to something more like its original Christian context: ‘In other words it becomes the devil again’ (ibid.). In the Marxist context ‘the alienated are those who have been dispossessed by their masters, and who therefore recognize their masters as their enemies’ (NFMC, 11), but in this new context ‘the master or tyrant is still an enemy, but not an enemy that anyone can fight’ (NFMC, 12). In short, the enemy is ‘our own deathwish, a cancer that gradually disintegrates the sense of community’ (ibid.).

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If after a war the quality of human life improves, we must not attribute this to war. Rather, it is the fruits of peace. In ‘The Present Condition of the World,’ he speaks of ‘the outburst of “post-war planning,” the promises made to labour, the technological Utopias and social security schemes’ (LS, 208). He continues: But these, if they are to be of any use, must be regarded as rewards of peace, not of war. A corrupt tree can only bring forth corrupt fruit, and the notion that some good may be salvaged from this evil and monstrous horror is, however pathetic and wistful, a pernicious illusion. In temporal terms, peace is an economic system functioning: war is the economic system breaking down. When we recover peace we shall recover the benefits of peace; but to regard them as benefits of war is at best a case of post hoc propter hoc. And that such benefits will be ‘worth’ the blood and misery and destruction of the war is nonsense, unless posterity are insanely cynical bookkeepers. (ibid.)

In line with his anti-war stance, Frye was sceptical of the war effort at the time of the Second World War. He was ambivalent towards the war effort as late as spring 1943, when he wrote the essay ‘The Present Condition of the World.’ The essay is actually focused upon North America, and though it is unfinished, its occasion and theme might lead us to consider it to be a North American counterpart of Orwell’s wartime meditation on the United Kingdom, ‘England Your England.’ Like Orwell, Frye takes upon himself the task of defining his nation at a time of war, though he focuses on the United States rather than on Canada. For Frye, the war represents a struggle against ‘an objectification of our own worst impulses’ (LS, 217), but it may not result in the defeat of those tendencies: ‘We stand before them like Ebenezer Scrooge at his own grave … what is confused and sporadic in us is logical and systematic in them. If the military defeat of Germany involves for us a total rejection of what Nazism stands for, we shall have cast out one of our most dangerous devils: if it involves the acceptance of it, and it is still possible that it may, our last state will be monstrously worse than our first’ (ibid.). Similarly, Frye was convinced that a third world war could never be justified. War has no power to resolve conflict; it simply exacerbates it: There is at present a feeling, in which we hardly as yet dare to indulge ourselves, that another war is no more inevitable than any other evil pro-

Freedom and Equality 87 duced by human fear. Some of us think of a struggle between democracy and Communism carried on at other levels. But if the entire Communist world were annihilated tomorrow all our enemies would still be with us, in many respects stronger than ever. (WE, 101)

But how could the ghastly prospect of hot war be averted and the Cold War ended? For Frye, the Cold War and the hot war it might lead to are the result of undialectical partisan thinking. As previously argued, Frye’s own political thinking is dialectical, suprahistorical, and postpartisan, and, as I shall go on to explain, such thinking ultimately points to how freedom and equality can be fostered in society, war avoided, and a durable peace achieved. Towards the Free and Equal Society: Frye’s Dialectical Political Thinking A New Refutation of Left and Right We might proceed with some textbook-type observations about capitalism and Communism. Typically, the political Right advocates an antirationalist view. This view argues that, human nature being both immutable and corrupt, it is unwise to make of human society a test bed for radical ideas about how to reorganize society. Any such experimentation is likely to result in circumstances in which original sin is given free reign to crush underfoot much of what society has achieved. The argumentation of the Left runs contrary to this. The Left defends the rationalist view. Human nature is malleable, and human society can be engineered by the people themselves, or rather by those who temporarily hold the reigns of power of their behalf. The capitalist system prioritizes, according to its supporters, freedom in society. It is easy to create freedom in society; all that it takes is for the government to leave people alone, for it is ‘the state’ that circumscribes individual liberty. For this reason ‘small government’ is always preferable to ‘big government.’ This system does not stress equality in the way that it emphasizes freedom, but attempts to reduce inequality are frequently made in capitalist societies. One could say that if and when it does so reduce inequality, capitalism pursues equality through freedom. Laissez-faire is based on the assumption that if society is left well alone, individuals in society will use their freedom to quickly estab-

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lish a ‘temporal Utopia’ (NFMC, 239). Again, the argument of the Left proceeds in the opposite direction. The freedom of laissez-faire creates chaos in society. Unchecked, capitalism creates a vast dispossessed and alienated working class; at the other end of the social hierarchy it gives rise to oligarchy. Society is thus characterized by the most egregious inequality. Moreover, the only people in society who stand a chance of enjoying freedom are those who by hook or by crook have managed to insinuate their way into the ranks of the oligarchy. Equality, then, must be made a priority. By creating equality, by which we mean equality in terms of standard of living, or at least ironing out some of the most heinous manifestations of inequality, the right conditions for freedom in society can be created. And the ‘state’ must play a crucial role in bringing this situation about. From Frye’s point of view, however, the notion that capitalism has the power to create a more egalitarian society is simply self-delusion, and, similarly, the hope that Communism can create the conditions for freedom also goes against the record of historical experience. It seems that in pursuing freedom one automatically demotes equality, and that by making equality a priority one compromises freedom: A totalitarian society may perhaps be reminded that it can pursue equality to the point of forgetting about liberty. A society like ours can be reminded that we can pursue liberty to the point of forgetting about equality. (NFMC, 278)

Frye’s critique of capitalism and Communism is yet more trenchant, however. Not only are these systems incapable of creating the value they think of as their second biggest priority, they are actually largely incapable of nurturing the living condition they hold most dear, freedom for capitalism, equality for Communism. The freedom enjoyed by those who live in capitalist countries is not genuine freedom at all. Laissez-faire, as we have already seen, is nothing more than ‘the doctrine of the individual liberty of the natural man’ (NFMC, 239). By the same token, material equality is equality not worth having. Such a conception of equality derives from the degradation of the word ‘charity,’ which, in his view, has degenerated to the stage where it is a ‘class word’ (NFMC, 277). Moreover, the rationalist and anti-rationalist sympathies of Left and Right are themselves foolhardy. Laissez-faire is based on an optimistic view of human nature: American society is underpinned by Rousseau’s

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arguments about human nature, which suggest that ‘man is by nature good, and has been corrupted by institutions’ (NFMC, 251). But in Frye’s view ‘faith in human nature’ (NFMC, 252) is conducive to totalitarianism, which, in contrast to Orwell, for whom totalitarianism is synonymous with bureaucracies and their power-worshipping intellectuals, he associates with the ‘mob’: The nauseous adulation of dictators is the feature of totalitarian life most shocking to a democrat, and this kind of adulation is the narcissism of the mob. The position of general leadership, in contrast to the position of specific responsibility, is always a projection of a mob’s unconditioned will, and means that man has begun to worship himself. (ibid.)

But at the same time the notion that the doctrine of original sin dictates that any attempt to move towards the classless society is always nothing but dangerous experimentalism is viewed by Frye as deeply immoral. Indeed, he believed that the failure to abolish social class is anti-democratic: ‘Anti-democratic activity consists in trying to put class distinctions on some permanent basis’ (NFMC, 252). Beyond Left and Right To begin with the opposition between rationalist and anti-rationalist, Frye accepts neither position. He starts out with the Christian conception of original sin, which may be broadly suggestive of anti-rationalism, but rather than proceeding to the authoritarian correlate of this, which states that no social experiment geared towards a more just society should be attempted, he argues for circumscribed political power and the improvements in society which can be achieved through this strategy. For Frye, power is the problem, but the issue is not an empowered demos. Rather, the doctrine of original sin suggests that no leader be invested with excessive power. The concentration of political power in a charismatic leader or coterie only leads to a situation in which ‘progress’ becomes a euphemism for mass-murder, torture, ethnic cleansing, and the like. Frye’s own political thinking is dialectical, his sympathies lying not with capitalism or Communism but with democracy, and he insists that democracy has progressively distanced itself from Rousseauist assumptions. ‘It is gradually becoming clearer,’ he states, ‘that the real principle of democracy is ‘not “faith in human

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nature,” but the limitation of human power’ (NFMC, 252). The concept of original sin points not to authoritarianism, but to an optimum diffusion of power in society. And such a view allows him to go on to advocate the kind of transformation of society associated with the political Left. So long as power is diffused and not concentrated in society, we can feel more confident about the process whereby the people and their representatives engage in attempts to improve living conditions. It is, however, what Frye says about freedom and equality in society that represents the heart of his dialectical political philosophy. Fully developed democracy remains a work in progress: it is more an ambition than a political reality, rather like the ideal tertiary level of education: I think if the Russians, let us say, were not issuing propaganda statements, they would say that they were not living in a socialist state; that they were living through a proletarian revolution which is trying to become a socialist state. And we, I think, might very well say, not that we are living in a democracy, but that we are living in something much more like a bourgeois oligarchy trying to become a democracy. (NFMC, 275)

What Frye argues for in the first instance is a new politics beyond the left-wing and right-wing orientations of his day, one that would ultimately lead to an authentic development of democracy. In the previous chapter I explained that Frye thought of the three revolutionary values as crucially interlinked, but in his articulation of his political view he strategically separates them. He returns to a more conventionally liberal view of the educated citizen: his education makes him free. Equality, more specifically equality of opportunity, is to be engendered through political means which are rendered possible by freedom. Significantly, considerations of fraternity, the third revolutionary value, are absent from his main political writings, such as ‘Trends in Modern Culture,’ his most comprehensive statement on politics and society. The exclusion of the concept of fraternity, however, is conducive to dialectical thinking. The central belief of Frye’s dialectical and suprahistorical political thinking is that the objectives of both laissez-faire and Communism, namely freedom and equality, are not mutually exclusive but partly achievable in Western societies in the second half of the twentieth century. For Frye, freedom must come first. In ‘Trends in Modern Culture’ he argues for a two-stage social revolution, the first stage of which relies on

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the power of liberalism in society. In Frye’s view, American liberalism is a site of intellectual struggle in his age. His argument is that while American life is controlled by what he terms ‘deism,’3 liberalism proper has the power to begin a major transformation in society. Merging Blakean and New Testament resonances,4 he defines liberalism as the doctrine that society cannot attain freedom except by individualizing its culture. It is only when the individual is enabled to form an individual synthesis of ideas, beliefs, and tastes that a principle of freedom is established in society, and this alone distinguishes a people from a mob. A mob always has a leader, but a people is a larger human body in which there are no leaders or followers, but only individuals acting as functions of the group. (NFMC, 257)

American deism suppresses freedom, however. It is ‘a hopeful, liberal, and active belief’ (NFMC, 256), for which reason it is often assumed that deism is ‘the true faith of democracy’ (NFMC, 257). For Frye, however, in the case of American deism, liberalism is founded on nothing more than the ‘relaxing [of] the social order’ (NFMC, 258), and consequently it actually stands in the way of freedom in society. ‘The criterion of reality, in Deist theory,’ he explains, ‘is what present man, say a normal American middle-class adult, thinks to be real’ (ibid.). The individual who goes through the educational system that deism controls simply learns to meet the ‘social norm’ (ibid.). ‘This recurrence of a social norm,’ he explains, ‘is marked in Deist educational theories, which usually begin with the individual and his interests, then go on to “education for today” – or tomorrow, depending on taste – and finally become absorbed in participation, adjustment, integration, orientation, and other benevolent euphemisms for mass movement’ (ibid). However, what enables the individual to form his own individuality and establishes the principle of freedom in society is the university. In ‘Trends in Modern Culture’ he argues that liberalism and the freedom it promises are largely a question of establishing the university in the centre of society: The draft that draws the fire of freedom is liberal education, the pursuit of the truth for its own sake by free men. This pursuit of truth is an act of faith, a kind of potential or tentative vision of an end in human life. Without this tentative vision, all activity can only be the implementing of the greedy passions produced by a will that can only see what it thinks it can reach. (NFMC, 259)

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Academic freedom points to the fact that ‘ideas and works of the imagination must be studied as far as possible without reference to ordinary society’s notions of their moral or political dangers’ (WE, 111). In the previous chapter, I emphasized the interconnectedness of education and ordinary work in Frye’s thinking, but in the above passages he seems to come dangerously close to suggesting that education in itself, education bereft of work, is his ideal. However, in other passages from his early writings he speaks more clearly about the fact that what education fosters in society is a socially engaged educated group: The motive for getting such an education is not masochism, but simply self-preservation. Although America is a peaceful nation, peacetime American civilization is not good enough yet to supply what William James called a moral equivalent of war. It has reached the final dilemma of laissezfaire, in which the highest qualities of real civilization, cooperation, sacrifice, and heroic effort, are now brought out only by wartime conditions. Hence we must either accept war as the noblest condition of man, like the fascists, or improve the human quality, as opposed to the material quality, of our peacetime civilization. The hundred per cent American will have to do at least fifty per cent better or America (and of course Canada with it) will go the way of all muscle-bound empires which nowadays collapse rather more quickly than they used to do. The danger is there, but danger is not fate, and even a very small minority of educated neurotics might turn the scale. The Bible tells us that ten righteous men would have saved Sodom from destruction [Genesis 18:32]. (WE, 49)

Liberty thus defined, in Frye’s view, creates the right conditions for democracy. ‘A democracy, even in the mind, must have freedom, and by learning to use his intelligence the student is learning the secret of freedom’ (WE, 98). If his view was simply an argument concerning how to create freedom in democratic society, however, we would only have one half of a dialectic, and his theory could easily be appropriated by the Right. But freedom in his view creates the right conditions for the next stage of the democratic evolution. ‘It is only in a condition of freedom,’ he argues, coming to the heart of the matter, ‘that democracy can make the evolution that will save it’ (NFMC, 259). In ‘Trends in Modern Culture’ he reveals that his hopes for future peace rest on the new political culture of his times, which has been shaped by the experience of the Great Depression and the Second World War. In contrast to Orwell’s nostalgia for mid-nineteenth-century life in the United States, where men

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‘were free and equal,’5 Frye focuses on the social democratic achievements of the first half of the twentieth century: Up to 1929, American democracy to a great extent depended passively on the automatic stimulus of prosperity. The crash of that year brought to an end the Utopian illusion in American life, the hope of raising the standard of living to a classless level in America alone. The scrambling treasure hunt of laissez-faire is still a conspicuous feature of the American economy; but in the last two decades the rise of social services, social sciences …, a civil service nurtured by long periods of unchanged government in the United States and Canada, and the first major efforts at integrating the political and economic structures have brought about a silent and gigantic revolution. (NFMC, 253)

Of course, it is the continuation of this revolution that is of the utmost importance. Just as it is for Marxism, the goal of democracy is ‘a classless society consisting entirely of workers, and a self-controlling administrative structure replacing the old “state,” or government by rulers,’ but both democracy and Communism conceive of their next phases in terms of a ‘transitional phase’ (NFMC, 252). For Communism, it is the ‘Marxist proletarian dictatorship.’ For democracy, it is the ‘open class society.’ The principle behind this latter is ‘equality of opportunity.’ ‘All thoughtful democrats agree,’ explains Frye, ‘that the main threat to democracy from within arises, not from disparities of wealth, but from disparities of opportunity’ (ibid.). The new politics he promotes is a politics aiming to take democracy forward to this stage of development, where the objectives of both Left and Right are (partly) achieved. This revolution would not lead to the classless society; but it might lead to a society based on the principle of equality of opportunity, which could serve as a stepping-stone towards a more just society. Returning to the problem of war, in Frye’s view the political revolution that would be precipitated by real freedom in society would also be sufficient to extinguish the threat of war. He has faith in what political scientists now call ‘soft-power,’ where a political model leads by example rather than force, impressing alien systems through tangible successes. As he sees it, the next possible phase of democracy may have such integrity that it might prove to be the most desirable form of modern culture, achieving recognition as such. It would lead to the spread of democracy throughout Communist countries, and so the world. ‘If democracy attains the next stage of its evolution,’ he states optimisti-

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cally, ‘it may soon gain control of the world without a major war’ (NFMC, 254).6 Moreover, democracy holds out the promise of something vastly superior to what Fascism and Communism have to offer: the world federation alluded to above. Frye makes only a passing reference to this prospect, but we can infer a certain amount about it. Such a world federation would consist of at least three geopolitical units: the United States (along with Canada) would co-exist with a democratic west European Union and a democratic East Asia centred on China. In this world we would not have warfare between rival types of Communism; nor would it be necessary for one country to place the others under martial law. As democracies, these continental powers could potentially co-exist peacefully. Power would be shared rather than wielded by the most powerful. This would not be a world of ‘three great empires, each selfcontained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one guise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy’ (Orwell, 8–9). In this world the struggle between labour and management would be the focus of conflict, as it has been in democracies. Paradoxically, Marx is the prophet of this era: while Frye is anti-Communist, he accepts the Marxian analysis of society to a significant degree: The factors which are the same throughout the world, such as the exploitation of labour, have always been, if not less important, at any rate less powerful in history than conflicts of civilizations. Now they are more important, and growing in power. (NFMC, 313)

In this world it would be possible to gradually eradicate exploitation. Perhaps this would be achieved through the same ‘cold civil war’ (NFMC, 251) that has taken place between capitalists and labour until now in non-Communist countries. However, as it is achieved, the condition of man throughout the world would improve steadily, freedom and equality burgeoning everywhere. Conclusion, with Reflections Originally, Frye believed that the kind of freedom created in society by the university would be insufficient for freedom proper, and therefore for the development of democracy. His early willingness to think in terms of the church and university as the two sources of freedom in society led him to think in terms of Christian liberty as the fulfilment of the

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kind of freedom derived from education. In ‘Trends in Modern Culture,’ after having considered the need for university education, he goes on to consider the church. ‘The draft, to complete its work, needs a chimney reaching to the sky. Liberal education by itself,’ he continues, ‘cannot envisage the end of human life except as a vague future: the revolutionary’s claim that liberalism is only a lazy way of postponing social action is so far true’ (NFMC, 259). What liberal education must be supplemented with is, of course, the eternal perspective: Man does not lose his claustrophobia and panic, and the process of liberty does not function, until the ideal of partial improvement expands to the ideal of infinite regeneration. This does not sacrifice a specific improvement to a muzzy benevolence: it merely replaces the tantalizing future goal with a real presence which extends over all life and death, and so guarantees the present value of every act of charity. When we act in this light, we find that we are not members of a social group, but of one body. Without this infinite expansion of the liberal ideal, liberalism cannot avoid the dilemma of either returning to a criterion of immediate usefulness or getting lost in an impossible objectivity. Such an infinite expansion includes, of course, God as well as man, and must be based on a definitive revelation of the way in which God and man are united. (ibid.)

In connection with this factor, Frye actually moves from the utopian to the apocalyptic in his thinking. The vision of world federation referred to above extends no further than an utopian level of development, which, as Frye learned from Blake, ‘means an orderly molecular aggregate of individuals existing in some future time’ (M&B, 197). Demonstrating that Protestantism is the true faith of social democracy, his political thinking proceeds to eschatology. In ‘Trends in Modern Culture’ he presents the reader with an apocalyptic vision of the end of history. In Frye’s view the organizing image of modern thought is the humorous picture of ‘the young lady of the limerick who smiled as she rode on a tiger’ (NFMC, 260), but if society develops in the way he has outlined, this will change: If this age really does see the decisive struggle of liberty and terrorism for the fate of the world, the pattern of thought will make the necessary change – unless terrorism wins, in which case there will be no pattern at all. If liberty wins, we shall have, instead of the complacent and doomed young lady on the tiger, the image of a conquering hero with a dead dragon at his

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feet. As we continue to look at the hero, we shall see in him the image of a consciousness that has absorbed the unconscious and defeated all the dark powers of our present thought: a man armed with the power of God extending through all the eons and light years of nature, the conquered territory of death annexed to his life, fulfilling the desire and liberating the oppression of all men. As we continue to look at the dragon, we shall see in him the rotting body of what is now laying waste the world: the body of eternal bondage, the endlessly postponed vision of peace and leisure, the endless intrusion of temporary necessity to thrust us away from real life, the endless massing of lynching mobs to transfer our self-contempt to another scapegoat, the reduction of individual life to a hopeless isolation surrounded by threats of torture. (NFMC, 261) .

Towards the end of his career, Frye lays great emphasis on the fact that all faiths, Protestantism included, are ‘to some degree partial’ (NFR, 81); but during the Cold War he was universalist in his thought, connecting the end of times with Protestantism only, as if other religions had no social relevance. Of course, he believed that by far the most likely outcome was neither total annihilation nor the millennium. In 1964, in his ‘Education – Protection Against Futility,’ he provides us with a frank commentary on the Cold War which, with its parenthetical remark at the end of the passage quoted, seems to undercut the apocalypticism of his analysis in ‘Trends in Modern Culture’: There are many things that can happen to the human race before the end of the twentieth century. One of them is extermination: another, according to a great many theologians, including, as I remember, Isaac Newton, is the millennium. We may perhaps assume that what will actually happen will fall somewhere between these two extremes. (WE, 212–13)

But his Blakean political thinking extended to such apocalypticism of a necessity. For Frye, such thinking is not a prediction of what is likely to happen in the future, but a vision of what is desirable. Man’s desire being infinite, it extends beyond utopia to apocalypse. The apocalyptic thinker charts a course from here to apocalypse. Like the utopian thinker, he doesn’t think that the terminus ad quem will be reached; but only this telos will do. In Blake, the Fall, which for Blake actually starts with Creation, is conceived of in terms of dichotomy. As S. Foster Damon explains:

Freedom and Equality 97 Beginning with the separation of light from darkness, it proceeds through the six Days of Creation, culminating in the separation of man from God. After that, the sexes are divided, in the creation of Eve; Good and Evil, in the eating of the fruit; man and happiness, in the expulsion from the Garden; soul and body, in the first murder; man from his brother, in the confusion of tongues at Babel. (Damon, 94)

In the apocalypse, each of the dichotomies of the Fall returns to unity: Blake reunited man and God, who are inseparable; man and man in the Brotherhood which is the Divine Family; man and nature, which is his projection; man and woman, who together constitute the Individual; soul and body; good and evil; life and death. The basic, ultimate reality is the union of God and man in the mystical ecstasy. (Damon, 418)

It is possible to discern a similar, albeit foreshortened, kind of development in Frye’s thinking. Frye unites beauty and ‘truth’ (within the context of Blake and that of the whole of literature), work and leisure, and freedom and equality. (The unity of belief and vision will be explored in the next chapter.) Blake’s process of unification proceeds sequentially towards apocalypse; Frye reunites ever greater opposites, his thinking as a whole also oriented toward apocalypse. That said, Frye’s faith in the ability of the church to supplement the university was, however, not strong. Writing the essay in connection with the United Church’s Commission on Culture proved to be a thoroughly laborious endeavour. As Jean O’Grady suggests, the responsibility was ‘accepted inwardly with poor grace’ (Frye and the Word, 178). ‘The diaries,’ she explains, ‘were full of such remarks as “cut the goddam Commission on Culture, which is a hell of a waste of time” (D, 129) and “diddled with the Culture Commission nonsense” (D, 369)’ (ibid.). As we shall see in chapter 7, scepticism about the church does not entail the abandonment of Christianity. But as O’Grady argues in her essay, Frye is interested in the church in proportion as it approaches the ‘condition of a university’ (Frye and the Word, 182). His main interest throughout the best part of his career was in secular institutions. Principally, he thought purely in terms of the value of free education; pursuing a secular career, it was the importance of the university that became his primary concern for many years. Perhaps Frye was influenced by Canada’s multicultural make-up. In 1971 the Liberal Prime

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Minister Pierre Trudeau declared Canada bilingual and multicultural, and this move was consolidated in 1988 by the Multiculturalism Act. Clearly, within a multicultural context, Protestantism does not have as broad an appeal as liberalism. Whatever the reasons for his focus, when he offers a solution to the standoff with the Soviet Union, it is, as we have seen, simply educated citizens that he pins his hopes on, and, in relation to this, the apocalyptic perspective is only developed in his most unguarded statements. In this chapter I have thrown light on Frye’s dialectical, suprahistorical, and post-partisan political thought. In Frye’s view, the political goals of Left and Right are suggestive not of a dichotomy but of a necessary unity. The freedom that stems from a free university in society and the educated minority produced by that institution point the way towards a society characterized by equality of opportunity, which may hold the key to future peace. To the twenty-first-century reader, Frye’s viewpoint may seem decidedly social democratic and therefore left-wing. In our times we tend to think of the Left in connection with social democracy and the Right with neo-liberalism. But that spatial arrangement is undoubtedly misleading. Instead, we should think of social democracy of the kind that Frye advocates as the post-partisan option. As Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson remind us: ‘Traditionally, the “third way” [has] described the middle course between free-market capitalism and communism, i.e. the social-democratic model.’7

7 Belief and Vision: Frye on Scripture

Towards the end of chapter 6 I explained that in ‘Trends in Modern Culture’ Frye was prepared to state that ‘the church’ – the Protestant church – imparts a refinement and completion of the freedom fostered by the university in society. I also commented on the fact that in practice he tends to focus on the freedom fostered by the university and discount the notion that the church supplements that freedom. But while his theory of education and work provides us with an account of how vision redeems work, it does not go beyond the world of work, and so offers no suggestion as to how vision can be combined with action more generally in the individual’s public and private life. Additionally, if multiculturalism and the international nature of the university community meant that, on one level, Frye invested more in the university rather than in any form of Protestantism, it is perhaps the case that these important considerations were nonetheless trumped by the simple fact that the Bible is “the Great Code of Art,” and that the understanding of literature must rest on a solid knowledge of Scripture. While steering clear of the authority of the church, but in connection with the above considerations, Frye turns to the authority of Scripture in The Great Code and numerous related essays. In chapter 5 we saw that for Frye work without leisure is drudgery, and leisure without work dandyism, that his interest is in dialectical thinking, and that consequently his ideal is visionful work. His dialectical thinking about Scripture is animated by the desire to move beyond the opposition of vision and belief, or, more precisely, belief bereft of vision and vision without belief, both of which he views as vices:

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Belief without vision, the ordering of one’s life without a clear notion of what it should be ordered to, soon breaks down, within religious bodies, into anxieties over secondary moral issues. When we talk with some members of those bodies, we find all too often that anxieties over liquor, contraception, divorce, dietary ordinances, absence from church, and the like have blotted out most of the religious horizon for them … Vision without belief produces what the philosopher Sartre calls, very accurately, ‘bad faith.’ This is as a rule the contemplation of a timeless body of truth in itself, with none of the limitations of a specific temporal and historical conditioning for oneself taken into account. No human being is in a position to gain any benefit from that kind of vision, and the truths such a vision express soon shrivel into platitudes, which are true only because they are too vague to be opposed. (NFR, 350–1)

In the previous sections in which we have looked at Frye’s thinking we have uncovered attitudes to culture which Frye opposes on account of their being undialectical and highly political. In each case an opposition bearing left-wing and right-wing alliances forms the background to Frye’s thinking, and his own thinking is suggestive of how this opposition, along with its political sympathies, may be transcended. It is difficult to view his theory of the Bible in terms of a political dialectic as we did the other components of his thought dealt with in previous chapters, for we do not start out with a clear radical versus conservative background. Historically, the Left has not produced its own version of faith and scripture, preferring anti-clericalism to a coherent hermeneutical alternative. But, as in the other contexts, his thinking in this area is dialectical, suprahistorical, and, being based upon the notion of the necessary unity of opposites, distinctly Blakean. Just as in chapter 5 I considered education in itself before turning to the combination of work and education, so in this chapter I shall consider Scripture before turning to the combination of belief and vision. I shall explain that Frye’s approach to Scripture is also dialectical. He argues that Scripture is conventionally approached in two opposed ways: as history or poetry. But Frye himself views Biblical narrative and meaning in connection with a third approach to Scripture, beyond the poetic and historical. Additionally, his interpretation, I shall explain, proceeds ‘dialectically’ through a series of separate stages of revelation, each stage representing an improvement on the previous one. At the end of chapter 5 I explained that, on account of its being to a

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significant extent focused on freedom, his dialectical thinking is also ‘liberal,’ and that as equality and fraternity are every bit as important as freedom in Frye’s theory, his is a greatly expanded liberalism. In this chapter I shall also argue that, in addition to being dialectical and suprahistorical, Frye’s theory of belief and vision is also Protestant, and that, in his view, it is not simply freedom, but power, love, and wisdom which should be associated with Scripture. The Narrative and Meaning of the Bible As Frye explains, while reading, the mind of the reader moves in two directions. ‘One direction is centripetal, where we establish a context out of the words we read; the other is centrifugal, where we try to remember what the words mean in the world outside’ (NFR, 83–4; cf. also AC, 67). Within the centrifugal context, ‘truth’ stems from the success of the correspondence between the structure of words and external nature, and the structure is true if it is a satisfactory counterpart to the external structure it relates to. This understanding of truth is suggestive of one view of ‘literal meaning,’ and such literalism forms the foundation of the faith of a great many religious people. History in Frye’s view ‘tells us of real events that we can assimilate to our ordinary experience because they are more or less what we should have experienced at the time’ (NFR, 20), but he is dismissive of the notion that Scripture is ‘history’ in this sense. On the subject of the Exodus he states: ‘Egyptian history knows nothing of any Exodus, just as Roman history knows nothing of the life of Christ’ (NFR, 13). When we encounter history proper in the Bible it is ‘didactic and manipulated history.’ ‘The Bible,’ he argues, ‘considered as history, is a baffling and exasperating document which the historian has to learn how to use, and it creates more problems than it solves’ (ibid.). The Exodus is not an accurate historical record. The historical Egypt, for that matter, was ‘no worse than … any other Eastern Nation’ (GC, 67). The accuracy with which the Bible records actual events cannot be ascertained. In a sense, this is unimportant, however, for ‘the Bible itself does not appear to regard confirming evidence from outside itself as really strengthening its case’ (NFR, 14). So, we move, Frye argues, ‘from the historical and doctrinal to the poetic and literary in getting a better understanding of the Bible’ (NFR, 19). But this step is by no means a solution to the question of how one should approach the Bible: ‘It sounds absurd to say that the Bible is a

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work of art or an epic poem like the Iliad or the Mahabharata’ (ibid.). Stories such as that of Samson are folk tales or allegories, and others like the story of Job are ‘explicitly poetical’ (NFR, 21), but such a solution is ultimately reductive. ‘Biblical myths are closer to being poetic than to being history’ (GC, 64), but ‘trying to reduce the Bible entirely to the hypothetical basis of poetry clearly will not do’ (GC, 65). In a characteristic dialectical manoeuvre Frye introduces a ‘third category,’ which he identifies as the ‘existential’ (NFR, 21). Here he introduces the distinction made by Bible scholars between Weltgeschichte and Heilsgeschichte. History as we are most familiar with it is represented by the former; the latter is ‘the history of God’s actions in the world and man’s relation to them’ (GC, 65). Frye thinks in terms of two levels of reality: the spiritual and the natural, and, in his view, myth presents us with what we might think of as the spiritual event, which contrasts sharply with what happens on the level of ordinary experience: The Bible, we said, has a historical myth that bypasses conventional historical criteria: it is neither a specific history nor a purely poetic vision, but presents the history of Israel, past and future, in a way that leaves conventional history free to do its own work. (GC, 83)

Scripture does not present us with a falsification of history; rather, it informs us of the spiritual form of events. ‘This may not be what you would have seen if you had been there,’ states Frye, ‘but what you would have seen would have missed the whole point of what was really going on’ (GC, 66). ‘The assumption,’ he explains, ‘is that in some events, at least, our ordinary experience does not tell us what is really happening’ (NFR, 20). The essential mythos of Biblical Weltgeschichte is ‘the inverted-U or negative cycle, the rise and fall of aggregates of human power’; that of Heilsgeschichte ‘the U-shaped positive cycle, the fall and rise of a representative of humanity itself, Adam or Israel or Job’ (NFR, 16). The former presents us with Joshua’s conquest of Canaan; but the end of the rise of the positive cycle is a spiritual event, which we would have missed had we been there as observers equipped with our limited powers of perception: The symbol of the end of the rise is Moses on top of a mountain seeing the Promised Land, or Elijah going up in a chariot of fire, or Job contemplating God’s Leviathan, or Jesus ascending into the sky. Nobody in history has ever

Belief and Vision 103 seen the Promised Land: what we get in history is Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, which starts the cycle turning once more. (ibid.)

Myth is bound up with the human belief in the possibility of a better future: The point is that when any group of people feels as strongly about anything as slaves feel about slavery, history as such is dust and ashes: only myth, with its suggestion of an action that can contain the destinies of those who are contemplating it, can provide any hope or support at all. (GC, 68)

As we shall see, ‘the U-shaped positive cycle’ is merely a stage in the process of the sharpening of spiritual vision – specifically the stage Frye connects with ‘prophecy.’ Of course the narrative unit on this level of response is still recognizably an event. It is a mythical event, but an event it remains. Gospel and apocalypse, however, follow on from prophecy, and in the Book of Revelation, where for Frye the focus is on the meaning of the whole of Scripture, the spiritual vision becomes entirely metaphorical, the meaning of Scripture being ‘a single metaphorical cluster.’ In the apotheosis of Scripture the focus is still on ‘what is happening,’ so to speak, but what is happening is ‘the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality of the logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world’ (GC, 246). The spiritual form of events is brought out progressively in Scripture, and Frye discusses the process in terms of the typology of the Bible. Christianity has always read its Bible as a typological structure: The general principle of interpretation is traditionally given as ‘In the Old Testament the New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament the Old Testament is revealed.’ Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a ‘type’ or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology. (GC, 98)

In contrast to secular literature, the content of the Bible is revelation, and Frye thinks in terms of seven main phases of revelation. Each phase is the ‘type’ of which the next is the ‘antitype.’ And it is this fact that points to the dialectical nature of his thinking in this area. ‘There seems to be a sequence or dialectical progression in this revelation, as the Christian Bible proceeds from the beginning to the end of its story … Each phase is not an improvement on its predecessor but a wider perspective on it’

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(GC, 126). The Book of Revelation completes this refining process. If in the older liberal Protestant tradition, gospel and the Gospels were often seen as opposed to apocalypse – certainly apocalypse as manifested in the Revelation of John, which could be seen as a lurid and partly sub– New Testament text – Frye yokes the two together: First is the Creation, not the natural environment with its alienating chaos but the ordered structure that the mind perceives in it. Next comes the revolutionary vision of human life as a casting off of tyranny and exploitation. Next is the ceremonial, moral, judicial code that keeps a society together. Next is the wisdom or sense of integrated continuous life which grows out of this, and next the prophecy or imaginative vision of man as somewhere between his original and his ultimate identity. Gospel and apocalypse speak of a present that no longer finds its meaning in the future, as the New Testament’s view of the Old Testament, but is a present moment around which past and future revolve. (ibid.)

Frye pinpoints a central sequence of revelation spread over four particular phases: revolution, law, wisdom, and prophecy. Wisdom represents an individualization of law, and prophecy an individualization of revolution. ‘The gospel … is a further intensifying of the prophetic vision’ (GC, 149), and apocalypse represents the culmination of the whole process. We might usefully take a closer look at a number of these phases revelation. The Dialectical Sequence of Revelation Law, Frye argues, is individualized by wisdom. ‘The conception of wisdom in the Bible,’ he argues, ‘as we see most clearly in some of the Psalms, starts with the individualizing of law, with allowing the law, in its human and moral aspect, to permeate and inform all one’s personal life’ (GC, 141). In connection with a degenerate and illiberal conception of education, wisdom is undesirable, a point that Frye refers to with deft irony: ‘Education is the attaining of the right forms of behaviour and the persistence in them, hence, like a horse, one has to be broken into them’ (ibid.). In its second aspect, however, wisdom is prudence, ‘a pragmatic following of the courses that maintain one’s stability and balance from one day to the next’ (ibid.). It may be that ‘the teaching of [Ecclesiastes] comes to a focus on a “work ethic” of “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might” (9:10)’ (GC, 144–5), but Frye

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wishes to combine work with its opposite, which is play. ‘Play … is the fulfilment of work, the exhibition of what work has been for’ (GC, 145). Such play, suggestive of a Blakean celebration of energy as eternal delight, is a human analogy of God’s acts of creation: The point is even clearer in the Book of Proverbs, where Wisdom is personified as an attribute of God from the time of creation, expressing in particular the exuberance of creation, the spilling over of life and energy in nature that so deeply impresses the prophets and poets of the Bible. The AV speaks of this wisdom as ‘rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth’ (8:31), but this is feeble compared to the tremendous Vulgate phrase ludens in orbe terrarum, playing over all the earth. (ibid.)

Frye concludes with two observations about wisdom. In the secular context he connects wisdom with education, but the real form of human wisdom is the ‘philosophia or love of wisdom that is creative and not simply erudite’ (ibid.). His second point raises wisdom beyond the kind of prudence that served as his starting point in this section. In his discussion of law he paraphrases Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: ‘the problem of human freedom cannot be worked out wholly within the categories of man as we know him and nature as we see it’ (GC, 141). Now he suggests that the wisdom phase provides us with the key to human freedom: The primitive form of wisdom, using past experience as a balancing pole for walking the tightrope of life, finally grows, through incessant discipline and practice, into the final freedom of movement where, in Yeats’s phrase, we can no longer tell the dancer from the dance. (GC, 145)

Wisdom is preoccupied with the past. Clearly another process of individualization is required, one which is oriented to the future. ‘Prophecy is the individualizing of the revolutionary impulse, as wisdom is the individualizing of the law, and is geared to the future as wisdom is to the past’ (ibid.). However, this individualizing of the revolutionary impulse turns out to be a development of the previous phase of revelation, wisdom. ‘Prophecy … incorporates the perspective of wisdom but enlarges it’ (GC, 148). Frye here reverts to the primitive conception of wisdom. ‘The wise man thinks of the human situation as a kind of horizontal line, formed by precedent and tradition and extended by prudence: the prophet sees man in a state of alienation caused by his own distractions,

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at the bottom of a U-shaped curve … It postulates an original state of relative happiness, and looks forward to an eventual restoration of this state, to, at least a “saving remnant”’ (GC, 148–9). Wisdom is characterized by ‘its sense of continuity, repetition, precedent, and prudence’ (GC, 145), but as he has already indicated, ‘the anxiety of continuity in time has to be superseded sooner or later by a break with it’ (GC, 127), and it is prophecy that effects this break, for prophecy urges us to think of the present as essentially an unmoored entity: The wise man’s present moment is the moment in which past and future are balanced, the uncertainties of the future being minimized by the observance of the law that comes down from the past. The prophet’s present moment is an alienated prodigal son, a moment that has broken away from its own identity in the past but may return to that identity in the future. (GC, 149)

Proceeding to the gospel, the intensifying of prophecy, Frye argues that Jesus’ Incarnation and Resurrection are suggestive of a distinction between ‘those who think of achieving the spiritual kingdom as a way of life and those who understand it merely as a doctrine’ (ibid.). He focuses on the conception of ‘repentance,’ though he uses the Greek term ‘metanoia,’ allowing greater freedom of interpretation. ‘What one repents of is sin,’ he states, but ‘sin’ is understood as ‘a matter of trying to block the activity of God,’ which entails ‘some curtailing of human freedom’ (GC, 150). In the context of wisdom, he has made reference to the visible and invisible orders of reality. Our world is a world of vanity, meaning that it is a world of emptiness: ‘To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness’ (GC, 143). Metonoia and sin are suggestive of the apocalyptic perspective: ‘The dialectic of metanoia and sin splits the world into the kingdom of genuine identity, presented as Jesus’ “home,” and a hell, a conception found in the Old Testament only in the form of death or the grave’ (GC, 150). Such a vision marks the beginning of a wholly new experience of time and space, where man goes beyond his essentially alienated relation to nature, and these considerations take Frye back to the Blakean view of time and space we considered in chapter 3: As a form of vision, metanoia reverses our usual conceptions of time and space. The central points of time and space are now and here, neither of which exists in ordinary experience. In ordinary experience ‘now’ contin-

Belief and Vision 107 ually vanishes between the no longer and the not yet. We may think of ‘here’ as a hazy mental circumference around ourselves, but whatever we locate in ordinary space, inside it or outside it, is ‘there’ in a separated alien world. In the ‘kingdom’ the eternal and infinite are not time and space made endless (they are endless already) but are the now and the here made real, an actual present and an actual presence. (ibid.)

In one section, Frye speaks of the gospel as an antitype of each of the phases preceding it. Gospel represents an individualizing of the law founded on the category of prophecy rather than wisdom (GC, 151). Citing Paul, he states that this gospel ‘sets one free of the law’ (ibid.). Of course thus far he has spoken only in individual terms, though ‘the gospel also brings in a new conception of “Israel” as the citizens of the kingdom of God … a possible social resurrection, a transformation that will split the world of history into a spiritual kingdom and a hell’ (GC, 154–5). The Book of Revelation is densely woven with allusions to the Old Testament; it should be thought of as ‘a progression of antitypes’ (GC, 155). The vision of St John the Divine is a vision of ‘the true meaning of the Scriptures, … his dragons and his horsemen and dissolving cosmos … what he saw in Ezekiel and Zechariah’ (ibid.). The apocalyptic vision follows on from gospel and it has two aspects. ‘One is what we may call the panoramic apocalypse, the vision of staggering marvels placed in a near future and just before the end of time’ (GC, 156). This is essentially the view of traditional Christian orthodoxy: As a panorama, we look at it passively, which means that it is objective to us. This in turn means that it is essentially a projection of the subjective ‘knowledge of good and evil’ acquired at the fall. That knowledge, we now see, was wholly within the framework of law: it is contained by a final ‘judgment,’ where the world disappears into its two unending constituents, a heaven and a hell, into one of which man automatically goes, depending on the relative strength of the prosecution and the defence. (ibid.)

But a ‘second or participating apocalypse,’ related to the apocalyptic vision of secular literature, and opposed to a spectatorial apocalypse, follows on from the first: The panoramic apocalypse ends with the restoration of the tree and water of life, the two elements of the original creation. But perhaps, like other restorations, this one is a type of something else, a resurrection or upward

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metamorphosis to a new beginning that is now present … The panoramic apocalypse gives way, at the end, to a second apocalypse that, ideally, begins in the reader’s mind as soon as he has finished reading, a vision that passes through the legalized vision of ordeals and trials and judgments and comes out into a second life. (GC, 157)

The vision of apocalypse is presented in Revelation, which represents an account of the total meaning of Scripture, which, as we have said, is ‘a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah’ (GC, 246). ‘Whatever is not part of the body of Christ,’ states Frye, ‘forms a demonic shadow, a parody of the apocalyptic vision in a context of evil and tyranny’ (NFR, 352), just as it does in his Blake theory. It is this vision that is shaped by the seven phases of revelation, this ‘meaning’ which the reader who has followed these phases comes into the possession of. As we saw in chapter 5, the university goes to work in society through those who have been taught its vision of society, the ‘real elite,’ as Frye calls them, and Christian vision also creates a special group in society. The expansion of vision is identified with the possession of a Pauline ‘spiritual body,’ and such spiritual enlightenment points to the creation of a parallel elite who enhance the ‘maturity’ of society: The genuine human being thus born is the soma pneumatikon, the spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:44). This phrase means that spiritual man is a body: the natural man or soma psychikon merely has one. The resurrection of the spiritual body is the completion of the kind of life the New Testament is talking about, and to the extent that any society contains spiritual people, to that extent it is a mature rather than a primitive society. (NFR, 176)

In an earlier chapter of The Great Code Frye had introduced the conception of the ‘royal metaphor,’ reworking the thoughts on aspects of metaphor he discussed in connection with Blake and literature: We spoke of the simple metaphor, of the ‘Joseph is a fruitful bough’ type, as an identifying of A with B, and said that such a metaphor is anti-logical. In logic A can only be A, never B, and to assert that A ‘is’ B overlooks all the real differences between them. But there is another form of identification that we do not think of as metaphorical but as the basis of all ordered categorical thinking. There is identification as as well as identification with. We identify A as A when we make it an individual of the class to which it belongs: that brown and green object outside my window I identify as a

Belief and Vision 109 TABLE OF APOCALYPTIC IMAGERY

Category

Class or Group Form

Individual

Divine

[Trinity]

God

Spiritual or Angelic

1) Fire-spirits (Seraphim) 2) Air-spirits (Cherubim)

Spirit as Flame Spirit as Dove or Wind

Paradisal

Garden of Eden

Tree of Life Water of Life

Human

People as Bride (Israel)

Bridegroom

Animal

Sheepfold or Flock

1) Shepherd 2) Lamb (Body and Blood)

Vegetable

Harvest and Vintage

Bread and Wine (First fruits)

Mineral

City (Jerusalem) Highway

Temple, Stone

(All individual categories metaphorically identified with Christ)

(GC, 186)

TABLE OF DEMONIC IMAGERY

Category

Manifest Demonic

Parody Demonic Group

Individual

Divine

[Satan]

Stoicheia Tou Kosmou

Antichrist

Spiritual or Angelic

1) Fire-spirits 2) Demons of Tempest

False gods

Moloch, Baal, Dagon, etc.

Paradisal

Waste Land and Sea of Death

Human

Those Cast Out

‘Great Whore’ (Heathen Kingdoms)

Nero, Nebuchadnessar, Antiochus

Animal

Dragons of Chaos (Leviathan, Rahab, etc.)

Beasts of Prey or Fertility

Deified Animal (Bull, Serpent)

Vegetable

Harvest and Vintage of Wrath

Mineral

Ruins

Tree and water of Heathen Power

Vegetation Gods and Earth-Mothers Heathen City (Babylon, Rome)

Tower of Babel (GC, 187)

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tree. When we combine these two forms of identification, and identify an individual with its class, we get an extremely powerful and subtle form of metaphor, which I sometimes call the royal metaphor. (GC, 106)

In the context of secular literature and the secular analogy of this vision, Frye speaks of the ‘concrete universal,’ stating that ‘there are no real universals in poetry, only poetic ones’ (AC, 115). But the apocalyptic vision of the Bible is founded on the real universal, this being the proper term for the royal metaphor. And in a crucial passage in The Great Code he discusses the fact that, although it may seem that Christianity is bound to develop in a centralized fashion, it must not. He begins this line of enquiry with reference to totalitarianism, in which ‘the individual is a member of a larger body, and exists primarily as a function of that body’ (GC, 118), a political situation which curtails human freedom. Totalitarian regimes rely on a perennial aspect of human character, ‘loyalty,’ which represents ‘the result of basing one’s life, or the essential part of it, on the realizing of a metaphor, specifically some form of the royal metaphor’ (GC, 119). In the first place, he accepts the idea that religion involves the same subjugation of the individual. ‘What is significant here,’ he writes, ‘is that religious bodies do not effectively express any alternative of loyalty to the totalitarian state, because they use the same metaphors of merging and individual subservience’ (ibid.). But what interests Frye is an alternative way of formulating the royal metaphor, one which redeems Scripture’s metaphor, and suggests fulfilment rather than depersonalization. He conceives of a decentralizing tendency opposed to the typical centralizing impulse of organized religion: Paul, for example, says that he is dead as what we should call an ego, and that only Christ lives within him (Galatians 2:20, and similarly elsewhere). This is the same metaphor, but the metaphor is turned inside out. Instead of an individual finding his fulfilment within a social body, however sacrosanct, the metaphor is reversed from a metaphor of integration into a wholly decentralized one, in which the total body is complete within each individual. The individual acquires the internal authority of the unity of the Logos, and it is this unity that makes him an individual. (ibid.) The apocalyptic vision, in which the body of Christ is the metaphor holding together all categories of being in an identity, presents us with a world in which there is only one knower, for whom there is nothing outside of or objective to that knower, hence nothing dead or insensible. This knower is also the real consciousness in each of us. (GC, 188)

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It is this understanding of the apocalyptic vision which interests Frye. Such a vision is one of ‘particularity’ rather than one of ‘unity and integration’ (GC, 189), and, is indicative of, he argues, ‘a reformulating of the central Christian metaphor in a way that unites without subordinating, that achieves identity with and identity as on equal terms’ (GC, 120). The Unity of Belief and Vision, and Frye’s Protestantism Drawing on the language of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Frye argues in ‘The Dialectic of Belief and Vision’ that ‘faith is the hypostasis of the hoped for and the elenchos of things not seen [11:1],’ and goes on to contend that the best translation of hypostasis is ‘substance,’ while elenchos should be translated as ‘manifestation’ (NFR, 349–50). The first observation to make in connection with this definition of faith is that ‘if faith is the substance of the “hoped for” (elpizomenon ), faith and hope, two of the three great theological virtues named by Paul [1 Corinthians 13:13], are essentially connected’ (NFR, 350). In this essay, Frye treats faith and hope as synonymous with belief and vision, and so, in effect, he is also connecting belief and vision. But what he means by faith or belief is at odds with the ‘traditional view,’ according to which ‘the visionary model of faith is the professed faith’ (ibid.). Instead, he connects faith with action rather than a declaration of adherence. Hope, he argues in an equally audacious manner, should be thought of as the ideal models we have in our minds, the vision offered by Scripture. Just as he takes issue with humanists’ separation of work from leisure, so he engages with religious bodies’ division of action from hope or vision. Uniting faith with vision, Frye, moving decisively beyond the Protestant doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone,’ argues that knowledge of the Bible represents hope, and our faith is the realization of that vision in our actions. This is the dialectical ideal which transcends both belief without vision and vision without belief. There is, however, no guarantee that the model that informs one’s actions is a good model, and this factor takes Frye on to consideration of the third and most important theological virtue. Speaking of ‘Paul’s third great virtue, agape or love’ (NFR, 359), Frye concludes his analysis by putting agape above the others: ‘Outside its orbit, faith and hope are not necessarily virtues at all; the same machinery of action conforming to a model vision goes into operation when we are embezzling funds or murdering our spouses’ (ibid.). Ultimately, love makes its appearance ‘not as a third virtue, but as the only virtue there is’ (ibid.). In Frye’s theological ideal,

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hope (vision) informs actions (faith), and the virtuous nature of hope and faith is guaranteed by their operating within the orbit of charity. Frye’s thinking is dialectical and suprahistorical, but just as his thinking about work and education can also be thought of as liberal, so his thoughts about belief and vision can also be identified as Protestant. As we saw in chapter 6, Frye thinks of Protestantism as a theory of personal liberty which parallels liberalism: Protestantism should represent an ‘infinite expansion of the liberal ideal’ (NFMC, 259). The kind of action Frye speaks of, which he also refers to as ‘faith,’ is free action. The world revealed by Scripture, ‘the kingdom of heaven,’ ‘a world of air and light,’ is a world of liberty: ‘It is a world of the spontaneous freedom, the independent power of action, which the image of the wind suggests’; ‘To enter a world of freedom where the intellect and imagination can function, we have to become a clean wind, a breath of fresh air’ (NFR, 336). But just as within the secular context he views liberty as a value which ultimately cannot be separated from equality and fraternity, so Christian liberty cannot be separated from love and wisdom. In ‘A Breath of Fresh Air’ he expands his commentary to incorporate the other conceptions associated with the Trinity in order to elaborate upon his notion of the interpenetration of power, love, and wisdom. ‘Wisdom leads to love, and love leads to power, and power takes us back to wisdom again … Power, wisdom, and love,’ states Frye, ‘are all aspects of the same thing, and none of them exists apart from the others’ (NFR, 337). His understanding of the conceptions is based upon the principle of interpenetration: power is wise and loving; wisdom is powerful and loving; and love is wise and powerful. Lastly, as I suggested earlier, on another level the very fact that Frye turns to the Bible at this stage of his career completes a dialectical manoeuvre. Having focused on secular themes and reached conclusions which point to an affirmation of the ideals of the French Revolution, Frye affirms the authority of the Christian Bible, and more specifically the three conceptions suggested by the Trinity, namely power, love, and wisdom. Historically, the Left has been anti-clerical, allowing faith to become associated with the political Right, and so his engagement with Protestantism is suggestive of the other half of the dialectic, and therefore the completion of an overarching combination of Left and Right in his work. ‘There will always be a curse on any critic who tries to see the Christianity and the radicalism of Blake as a dichotomy instead of a unity’ (FS, 338), states Frye, and the observation applies equally well to Frye himself.

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Conclusion To sum up my argument, in this study I have argued that Frye continuously seeks to transcend oppositional thinking which is suggestive of cyclical movements in the history of ideas. I have argued that it is the influence of Blake that lies behind his highly individual thinking, and that it is specifically the dialectical and suprahistorical kind of thinking suggested by the figure of Los and his relation to Orc and Urizen which inspires Frye’s own dialectical thinking. Frye is of course rooted in and limited by his own distinctive contexts, but it is nevertheless true that, inspired by Blake, Frye sought an intellectual identity capable of transcending opposing schools of thought in various fields of enquiry. Within the secular context these opposing ideas, along with the cycle they constitute, carry unmistakable political colours, and within that context Frye’s thinking is not just dialectical and suprahistorical but post-partisan, having moved beyond the level of conventional political commitments. I have provided an in-depth analysis of Frye’s politics, which mark a dialectical movement beyond Left and Right. If his politics are beyond Left and Right, so too is his cultural thinking, which represents a move beyond English as well as American cultural conservatives and cultural radicals. His thinking on the Bible, discussed in this chapter, is something of an exception, on account of the fact that the backdrop to his study is not characterized by the same Left versus Right opposition, but his interpretation of the Bible is also dialectical and suprahistorical. I have shown that Frye seeks to combine beauty and ‘truth,’ work and education, freedom and equality, and belief and vision. I have also drawn attention to the fact that his theory of education is not simply beyond left-wing and right-wing sympathies but, additionally, conventionally liberal, and that his dialectical thinking about Scripture also amounts to an articulation of his own understanding of Protestantism, which parallels his liberalism. Moreover, Frye’s trajectory is, as I have shown, suggestive of an overarching transcendence of Left and Right. In theory, such a transcendence could be achieved through a preference for the values of the Right – authority, hierarchy, property, and community – combined with the historical atheism of the Left. In Frye’s works, however, it is liberty, equality, and fraternity, combined with Blakean Protestantism, and especially power, love, and wisdom, which forms the unity. Somewhat paradoxically, what suggests itself for consideration at the end of this study is a dialectical opposition suggested by contrasting

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ways in which thinkers can dialectically move beyond traditional leftwing and right-wing positions. In connection with this dialectical alternative to Frye, characterized by the above-mentioned combination of atheism and right-wing values, the thinking of Ayn Rand comes readily to mind. Interestingly, we have recently learned that one of the unforeseen results of the present financial crisis is a sharp rise in the sales of Rand’s works. By way of a final contention, it is my hope that this study serves to remind the reader that in Frye we have an alternative to the solutions proffered by those who, like Rand, see our salvation in the marriage of atheism and unconstrained capitalism.

8 Epilogue

Frye’s view that the history of secular thought is characterized by the rise and fall of radical and Urizenic forces was, as already suggested in my Introduction, borne out by developments in politics and culture in the latter part of the twentieth century. Within the cultural field the Left gained a position of seemingly unfaltering ascendancy. Those engaged in ‘theory’ represent a new Left, albeit a thoroughly disunited one (Cusset, 187). In a recent history of literary theory, French Theory, François Cusset points out that ‘the cultural “Left” of university radicals … dissipated their power in isolated communities, without succeeding in building a common platform’ (ibid.). Commenting on the disunited nature of these divergent groups, he observes, ‘Apart from [joint mobilization of different radicals during the long Reagan-Thatcher decade], no unifying agenda ever took shape. On the contrary, the divergences between postcolonials, neofeminists, queer activists and various ethnic minority groups only became sharper’ (ibid.). The most significant fact about contemporary theories of culture is that what might be termed ‘ideology criticism’ is in the ascendancy. Focusing on ideology, Imre Salusinszky distinguishes between the Marxist understanding, exemplified by Terry Eagleton, and the less overtly Marxist but nevertheless materialist interpretation of the conception: ‘Ideology’ is a notoriously slippery term, but according to Terry Eagleton, one of its foremost students, its sense always has to do with the legitimating of society’s power-structure through a variety of strategies of signification: through promoting the society’s values; through naturalizing those

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values into apparently commonsensical presuppositions; through marginalizing rival forms of thought; and through mystifying the true power-relations that obtain in society (Ideology, 5–6). Softer, by which I mean less overtly Marxist, accounts of ideology than Eagleton’s tend to emphasize ideology as a contestive space of signification, rather than as a mechanism serving the exclusive interests of the dominant social group. Nevertheless, everyone seems to agree that ideology is the place where social belief, social value, and social power are inculcated in, and then expressed by, social subjects as meanings and interpretations. (Legacy, 76–7)

If the cultural Left is disunited, ideology is nevertheless the main interest of a group of diverse schools, in Salusinszky’s words, ‘the new historicists, the Foucauldians, the gender-studies and subaltern-studies people, the “polite” Marxists, the British cultural materialists’ (Legacy, 81). The cycle of history brought us to a contrasting conclusion within the realm of politics. While the Left gained a firmer grip on many aspects of cultural life, the political Right enjoyed another heyday. In the immediate post-war period, Frye had hoped that laissez-faire would die out. Improvements in democracy would lead to a universal acknowledgment that democracy was superior to Communism, and as a result democracy would spread, while Communism would die out. His hopes failed to materialize to the extent that unconstrained capitalism emerged from the Cold War with new-found confidence, a deeply ironic development for Frye, given that had he hoped that the defeat of Communism could only come about through abandonment of laissez-faire. It was the presidency of Ronald Reagan that aggressively reasserted the ethos of the free market. (Interestingly, Reagan’s politics had made an impression on Frye within the context of the student unrest of the late 1960s. In 1969, unrest broke out at the University of California, Berkeley, and Reagan, who was Governor of California at the time, opted for a high-profile campaign directed at the suppression of the students. Reagan ‘is visibly admiring his own image as a firm and sane administrator’ (WE, 387), stated Frye in May 1969.) The process of rolling back the changes introduced by the Great Society and New Deal was started during his time in office. Tax breaks for the rich were accompanied by a restructuring of the welfare system. Nixon had introduced New Federalism during his presidency, and it was taken up by Reagan as a means of transforming the U.S. from a welfare state to a ‘workfare’ one. New Deal initiatives such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children

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(AFDC) were targets for the new ethos. The ideology of the Republican Party under Reagan was summed up in the well-known observation, famously made at his inauguration in 1981, ‘Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ ‘Marching on the English Department While the Right Took the White House’: thus, in a chapter heading, Todd Gitlin sums up the endeavours of Left and Right in the 1970s.1 By the latter part of the century it seemed to many as though we were moving towards two concomitant unipolar worlds: a political one, in which democracy and a relatively unconstrained form of capitalism centred on the United States of America were triumphant, and a cultural one, in which cultural progressives or radicals enjoyed a contrasting victory. Towards the end of his career Frye was writing in the wake of the Cold War at a time when the ‘end of history’ thesis re-emerged, and in his later works he engages with both the supposed ‘end of history’ and what we might term a corresponding potential ‘end of history of ideas’ in relation to trends in the humanities generally and the study of English literature in particular. But for Frye the new ideas of Left and Right represent false dawns. Like the ideas which he reacts against in the earlier part of his career, they belong to the cyclical history of ideas; all ideas belonging to that history are undialectical, and these are no exception. We must look elsewhere, Frye would argue, if we are to uncover a set of ideas which represents something more than an inauthentic resolution of opposing points of view. The argument of this study is that we can look to Frye’s own dialectical thinking for some sense of transcendence in these areas of intellectual endeavour and related ones. In my Introduction I suggested that Frye’s thinking might be compared to the narrative movement that he himself had defined as ‘a dialectical movement from [the order of nature] into the apocalyptic world above’ (AC, 150). The imagery is suggestive of how we might view his thinking within the context of end-ofhistory theses. Metaphorically, we might say, Frye’s thinking is a ‘point of epiphany’ (AC, 189) in the history of ideas. Though such a closing statement may go some way towards bringing this study to a final conclusion, the question of which aspects of Frye’s works we should identify with remains partly unanswered, and it may be interesting to conclude this monograph with one or two observations on this subject. Frye’s dialectical view of education and work is, in the view of the present writer, an argument we can only identify with. To fail to do so, it would seem, can only mean that one adopts the attitude of

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an unreconstructed humanist, on the one hand, or an unreconstructed revolutionary on the other. In relation to Frye’s politics, anyone who identifies with the post-partisan perspective will have enormous sympathy for his view, while realizing that today’s circumstances are very different, and that, without lurching to the Right, new social democratic thinking is always needed. But a more nuanced view may be required within other contexts. It will be clear that I rank Frye’s dialectical thinking highly and would even claim that it is arguably superior to the positions over against which I define it. But while the areas of politics, on the one hand, and education and work, on the other, are ones in which we are compelled to choose one viewpoint to the exclusion of others, that of secular literature is not. While Frye advocates archetypal criticism, he repeatedly points out that such an approach is only one integral part of a literary education, albeit a very central part. (In Frye’s view different schools of criticism represent different teaching methods, and his post-partisan outlook is also manifest in his desire for different teaching and critical methods to be combined in the education process.)2 Moreover, we should remember that the view of literature discussed in chapter 4 is not Frye’s ‘last word’ on literary theory. Words with Power represents a follow-up to Anatomy of Criticism, providing the reader with a new and additional conceptual framework for the study of literature. These factors may be suggestive of how a sympathetic reader of Frye might respond to his archetypal theory. Any reader who identifies with the post-partisan viewpoint will probably find Frye’s argument about literature appealing, perhaps even prefer it to others, but he or she will also be aware of the fact that approaches other than the archetypal one play a crucial part in the education process. Moreover, our evaluation of Frye’s literary theory as it is laid out in this study should also take into consideration the fact that we must also pay attention to the conceptual framework laid out in the more recent Words with Power and perhaps even concede that that study might prove to be more capable of speaking to our times on account of its being more engaged with today’s issues. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, our appreciation of Frye’s view of literature might also need to have incorporated into it an awareness that in the last analysis what may be most of value in Frye’s literary theory is not the individual studies in themselves, but the body of ideas represented by the continuity between his two main theoretical statements.

Notes

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Introduction

1 Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), xx. Further references are abbreviated to Rereading Frye and incorporated parenthetically within the text. 2 Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word, Semeia 89, ed. James M. Kee (Guest ed.) and Adele Reinhartz (Board ed.) (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002). 3 Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye, ed. Jeffery Donaldson and Alan Mendelson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Further references are abbreviated to Frye and the Word and incorporated parenthetically within the text. 4 Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004). 5 Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (London: Routledge, 1994). (Further references are abbreviated to ‘Hart’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text.) Book-length studies of Frye have gradually become more and more inclusive. Anatomy of Criticism is the main subject of two book-length studies, Robert D. Denham’s Northrop Frye and Critical Method (1978) and A.C. Hamilton’s Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism (1990). In addition to this, it is also given prominent consideration in various other books on Frye’s criticism. Ian Balfour devotes the second chapter of his Northrop Frye (New York: Twayne, 1988) to the study of it; and in the first chapter of his Northrop Frye: The Theoretical

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Imagination, entitled ‘Reconstructing Criticism,’ Jonathan Hart also gives a great deal of attention to the book. Signs of the beginning of a shift in focus in Frye scholarship can be seen in Balfour’s Northrop Frye. Balfour sets out to discuss more of Frye’s works than his predecessors, and when speaking of this intention in his Preface he emphasizes particularly the importance of Fearful Symmetry: ‘My own study devotes considerable space to Fearful Symmetry, which I take to be of an importance almost equal to that of the Anatomy, though its circumscribed topic, the poetry of William Blake, has of necessity not gained it as wide an audience’ (Northrop Frye, ix). W.K. Wimsatt, ‘Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth,’ in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1966), 75–107 (p. 78). Further references are abbreviated to ‘Wimsatt’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text. P.M. Cummings, ‘Northrop Frye and the Necessary Hybrid: Criticism as Aesthetic Humanism,’ in The Quest for Imagination: Essays in Twentieth-Century Aesthetic Criticism, ed. O.B. Harbison, Jr (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 255–76 (p. 256). Further references are abbreviated to ‘Cummings’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text. Jan Slan, ‘Writing in Canada: Innis, McLuhan, and Frye: Frontiers of Canadian Criticism,’ Canadian Dimension 8 (August 1972): 43–6 (p. 46). Further references are abbreviated to ‘Slan’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text. Robert D. Denham, ‘Frye and the Social Context of Criticism,’ South Atlantic Bulletin 39 (November 1974): 63–72 (p. 63). Further references are abbreviated to ‘Denham’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text. Deanne Bogdan, ‘Northrop Frye and the Defence of Literature,’ English Studies in Canada 8 (June 1982): 203–14 (p. 203). Further references are abbreviated to ‘Bogdan’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text. Imre Salusinszky, ‘Frye and Ideology, in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 76–83 (p. 82). Further references are abbreviated to Legacy and are incorporated parenthetically within the text. Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (New York: Viking Books, 2006), 179. Anthony T. Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 138. François Cusset, French Theory, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 166. Further references are abbreviated to ‘Cusset’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text.

Notes to pages 13–55 121 15 James Davidson Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 63. 2

Mandarin and Rebel: Frye’s Dialectical Secular Thinking

1 Lorraine Clark, Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Further references are abbreviated to ‘Clark’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text. 3

Beauty and Truth I: Frye’s Theory of Blake’s Poetry

1 David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954); henceforth abbreviated as ‘Erdman.’ 2 Works by Blake cited in quotations from M&B are abbreviated as follows: K = The Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 3 vols. (London: Nonesuch Press, 1925; rpt. 1957, 1966.); E = The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); M = Milton; J = Jerusalem. 4

Beauty and Truth II: Frye’s Theory of Secular Literature

1 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5. 2 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 46. Further references are abbreviated to ‘Eagleton’ and incorporated parenthetically within the text. 3 T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrews (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), vii. 4 William K. Wimsatt, Jr, and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (London and Aylesbury: Compton, 1957), 473, 456. 5 Imre Salusinszky, Legacy, 81. 6 To Frye this is suggestive of a clear connection between ritual and narrative. ‘In human life,’ he observes, ‘a ritual seems to be something of a voluntary effort (hence the magical element in it) to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle’ (EICT, 129). Harvesting is not a ritual because it must take place at a particular time. Ritual is ‘a deliberate effort of a will to synchronize human and natural energies at that time,’ and rituals include ‘harvest songs, harvest sacrifices and harvest folk customs’ (ibid.). For Frye ‘the narrative aspect of literature is a recurrent act of symbolic com-

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munication: in other words a ritual’ (AC, 97). ‘The narrative patterns of literature’ he states elsewhere, ‘represent the absorption of ritual action into literature’ (WE, 461). 7 ‘There Is No Natural Religion’ (Erdman, 3). 8 ‘Civilization is not merely an imitation of nature, but the process of making a total human form out of nature, and it is impelled by the force that we have just called desire. The desire for food and shelter is not content with roots and caves: it produces the human forms of nature that we call farming and architecture. Desire is thus not a simple response to need, for an animal may need food without planting a garden to get it, nor is it a simple response to want, or desire for something particular. It is neither limited to nor satisfied by objects, but is the energy that leads human society to develop its own form’ (AC, 98). 5

Work and Leisure: Frye on the Individual in Society

1 Douglas Long offers a robust defence of Frye’s ‘liberal humanism’ which deals with the threefold case against him: ‘First, the charge of fraudulent essentialist universalism; second, the charge of ideological narrowness and bias; and third, the charge of unacknowledged exclusion.’ Douglas Long, ‘Northrop Frye: Liberal Humanism and the Critique of Ideology,’ Journal of Canadian Studies, 34, no. 4 (Winter 1999–2000): 27–51 (p. 46). And, like Long before him, Graham Good discusses Frye’s liberalism in connection with the term ‘humanism’ in a chapter entitled ‘The Liberal Humanist Vision: Northrop Frye and Culture as Freedom,’ in his Humanism Betrayed (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 89–102. 2 In addition to Long and Goodman, a number of other commentators on Frye’s work have focused on the political nature of Frye’s liberalism, discussing various aspects of it in a suggestive manner. In ‘Our Culture and Our Convictions,’ George Levine considers the ‘academic liberalism’ of Frye, Malcolm Bradbury, and George Steiner, and speaks of the liberalism of Frye’s literary theory. Levine argues that what distinguishes Frye’s ‘liberal’ literary theory is its negative relation to Arnold. ‘Frye,’ Levine states, ‘does not allow himself or modern critics to stand with Arnold because, as he says, the democratization of literature and society makes the elitist terms of Arnold’s criticism impossible.’ George Levine, ‘Our Culture and Our Convictions,’ Partisan Review 39, no. 1 (1972): 63–9 (p. 69). Similarly, David Cook is concerned with ‘Frye as a social critic and, in particular, with Frye’s defense of liberalism and his critique of technology.’ Cook speaks of the Canadian intellectual background of Frye’s liberalism, argu-

Notes to pages 72–91 123 ing that ‘Northrop Frye’s case for liberalism must be seen in the context of the boundaries set by the critiques of liberalism on the part of two Canadians, C.B. Macpherson and George Grant.’ David Cook, Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World (New York: St Martin’s, 1985), 6, 64. 3 David Kelley, A Life of One’s Own (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996). 4 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 142. 5 Interestingly, Frye’s decisive identification of the university with spiritual authority distinguishes him from Arnold. ‘The university,’ he declares, ‘seems to me to come closer than any other human institution to defining the community of spiritual authority … Arnold comes nearest to seeing the universities in this light, but universities in his day, and more particularly as he conceived them, made it necessary for him to distinguish them from “culture”’ (ENC, 285). 6

Freedom and Equality: Frye’s Political Philosophy

1 James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (London: Wyman & Sons, 1942). 2 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 324. Further references are abbreviated to ‘Orwell’ and are incorporated parenthetically within the text. 3 It is a commonplace that the intellectual life of eighteenth-century England was animated to a considerable degree by the desire to reconcile reason with religion. The main religious development of this tendency was ‘deism,’ the ‘religion without revelation,’ championed by Pope and Bolingbroke. Frye, however, along with some other commentators, claims that deism represents a powerful force in contemporary American society, too. ‘The Church of Deism or Natural Religion’ is the ‘established church in America today’ (LS, 210), he argues. Outlining the main characteristics of this faith, he states: ‘The essential principle of this religion is that there is no real world except the physical world and the order of nature, and that our senses alone afford direct contact with it. As this is the only real world, religion can provide no revelation of another, and to believe that it can represents a flight from reality. Nature being red in tooth and claw, we must not look for God there, but in man, and in nature to the extent that it is subdued and tamed by man. The essence of religion, therefore, is morality, dogma and ritual alike being parasites that settle on it in decay. The chief end of man is to improve his own lot in the natural world, and the

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noblest thing he can do (this is for wartime) is to lay down his life for posterity. The essential meaning of human life is the progressive removal of the obstacles presented by nature, including the survival within man himself of atavistic impulses harking back to an earlier state of greater bondage to it. This is done chiefly through the advance of science. By the advance of science is meant the increase in the comfort of the body, the mind being regarded as a bodily function. Mental education is a revelation of the natural world, including of course its fossilized form of the history and literature of the past’ (ibid.). Other commentators have made the same point about religion in the United States. In his ‘How Jefferson Honored Religion,’ for example, Joseph Koterski suggests that deism is the main religious movement in the United States. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Paine, argues Koterski, ‘were all deists, not Christians.’ ‘The God of deism,’ writes Koterski, ‘is a First Cause who has created the world and instituted its immutable and universal laws. But the deist insistence on conceiving of this God as an absentee landlord intentionally precludes any hint of divine immanence or divine intervention into history. Many of the Enlightenment philosophers who took deism to heart were quite critical of even the possibility of divine revelation, let alone Christianity’s claim about the necessity of such revelation.’ According to Koterski, a ‘softer theistic form of deism’ took root in the United States. Joseph Koterski, ‘How Jefferson Honored Religion,’ Crisis 19, no. 3 (March 2001): 35. ‘For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ’ (I Corinthians 12:12). George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1, An Age Like This, 1920–1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 499. In ‘The Church: Its Relation to Society,’ Frye speculates on a ‘third struggle’ which could ensue after the struggle between capitalism and Communism: ‘The possibility of a third struggle between managerial dictatorship and democracy, with Protestantism supplying the vision for the blind good will of the latter, looms up already in the background. Such a conflict, however ferocious, could hardly be either a genocidal war or a war of excommunications, but would have to be primarily evangelical and prophetic’ (NFR, 266). Little is made of this fascinating idea in subsequent writings, however. Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, The Age of Insecurity (London: Verso, 1998), xiv.

Notes to pages 117–18 125 8

Epilogue

1 Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 126–65. 2 Looking forward to a time of greater coherence in literary studies, Frye states, ‘I think myself that we shall see much more unity in contemporary criticism when we realize that most of these new schools are also new teaching methods, each of them finding its own centre of gravity at some stage of teaching. Students of linguistics, for example, naturally develop a special interest in the beginning stages of a language, and we notice that a significant number of scholars in this and related fields have devoted attention to kindergarten and grade 1 reading programmes. The so-called “New” Critics seem to have a particular centre of gravity in the upper years of high school and the lower undergraduate years, to which such textbooks as Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry naturally belong. My own interest, for the last dozen years, has been in a synoptic theory of criticism. I have been trying to relate the different techniques of criticism to one another, and if you read Anatomy of Criticism you will see that one of the first things I complain about in that book is the absence of a coherent teaching programme for English. But I have also a more specific interest, derived from my study of Blake, in criticism by means of myths and archetypes, which leads to special emphasis on conventions, genres, and the principles of literary structure and imagery. I think that this approach also has a particular of gravity in the teaching programme, one which comes somewhere between the end of elementary school and the beginning of high school. Some of my students have carried my critical principles into the teaching of English in schools, and they seem agreed that the logical place to begin studying myths and archetypes is grade 9’ (WE, 193). It should be clear by now that Frye’s view is post-partisan. In contrast to Frye, Eagleton envisages a ‘radical’ future for literary studies. ‘Radical critics are … open-minded about questions of theory and method: they tend to be pluralists in this respect. Any method or theory which will contribute to the strategic goal of human emancipation, the production of “better people” through the socialist transformation of society, is acceptable. Structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, reception theory and so on: all of these approaches, and others, have their valuable insights which may be put to use’ (Eagleton, 211). It is, however, difficult to see how all teachers and critics could participate in any united endeavour which is exclusively ‘radical.’

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Bibliography

Frye Publications Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. London: Penguin Books, 1990. (Orig. pub. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.) Anatomy of Criticism. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 22. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vols. 1–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 27. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Imre Salusinszky. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 17. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. (Orig. pub. 1947.) Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Ed. Nicholas Halmi, with an Intro-

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duction by Ian Singer. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. The Great Code: Being a Study of the Bible and Literature. Ed. Alvin A. Lee. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 19. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. (Orig. pub. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.) Interviews with Northrop Frye. Ed. Jean O’Grady. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 24. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 16. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 1932–1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Imre Salusinszky. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 17. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. London: Methuen, 1970. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. General Bibliography Atkinson, Dan, and Larry Elliott. The Age of Insecurity. London: Verso, 1998. Ayre, John. Northrop Frye: A Critical Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Balfour, Ian. Northrop Frye. New York: Twayne, 1988. Bogdan, Deanne. ‘Northrop Frye and the Defence of Literature.’ English Studies in Canada 8 (June 1982): 203–14. Boyd, David, and Imre Salusinszky, eds. Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. London: Wyman & Sons, 1942. Clark, Lorraine. Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Cook, David. Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World. New York: St Martin’s, 1985. Cummings, P.M. ‘Northrop Frye and the Necessary Hybrid: Criticism as Aesthetic Humanism.’ In The Quest for Imagination: Essays in Twentieth-Century Aesthetic Criticism, ed. O.B. Harbison, Jr, 255–76. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971. Cusset, François. French Theory. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988. Denham, Robert D. ‘Frye and the Social Context of Criticism.’ South Atlantic Bulletin 39 (November 1974): 63–72. – Northrop Frye and Critical Method. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1978. – Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Donaldson, Jeffrey, and Alan Mendelson, eds. Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Eliot, T.S. For Lancelot Andrews. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1929. Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954. Gitlin, Todd. Twilight of Common Dreams. New York: Holt, 1996. Good, Graham. Humanism Betrayed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Hamilton, A.C. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Hart, Jonathan. Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination. London: Routledge, 1994. Hunter, James Davidson. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Kee, James M., Guest ed., and Adele Reinhartz, Board ed. Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word. Semeia 89. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002. Kelley, David. A Life of One’s Own. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996. Koterski, Joseph. ‘How Jefferson Honored Religion.’ Crisis 19, no. 3 (March 2001): 35. Krieger, Murray, ed. Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. Kronman, Anthony T. Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

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Lee, Alvin, and Robert Denham, eds. The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1980. Levine, George. ‘Our Culture and Our Convictions.’ Partisan Review 39, no. 1 (1972): 63–9. Long, Douglas. ‘Northrop Frye: Liberal Humanism and the Critique of Ideology.’ Journal of Canadian Studies 34, no.4 (Winter 1999–2000): 27–51. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 1, An Age Like This, 1920–1940. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. Phillips, Kevin. American Theocracy. New York: Viking Books, 2006. Salusinszky, Imre. ‘Frye and Ideology.’ In The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham, 76–83. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Slan, Jan. ‘Writing in Canada: Innis, McLuhan, and Frye: Frontiers of Canadian Criticism.’ Canadian Dimension 8 (August 1972): 43–6. Wimsatt, W.K. ‘Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth.’ In Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger, 75–107. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1966. William K. Wimsatt, Jr, and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. London and Aylesbury: Compton, 1957. Woodcock, George. ‘Romanticism: Studies and Speculations.’ Sewanee

Review 88 (Spring 1980): 298–307.

Index

Abrams, M(eyer) H(oward), 11 Adams, John, 74 Alighieri, Dante, 52 American liberalism, 12–13 Aquinas, St Thomas, 33 Aristotle: Poetics (ca. 335 bce), 9, 56 Arnold, Matthew: Culture and Anarchy (1869), 75 Atheism, 113 Atkinson, Dan: The Age of Insecurity (1998), 98 Ayre, John: Northrop Frye: A Critical Biography (1989), 23 Balfour, Ian: Northrop Frye (1988), 7, 119–20n5 Berger, Pierre, 44: William Blake: Poet and Mystic (trans. 1914), 25 Bernard, Claude, 46 Bible, 4, 6, 7, 8, 15, 76, 99–114; See also individual books Blake, William, 7, 10, 12, 18–42 passim, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51–60 passim, 68, 91, 95, 96–7, 100, 105, 106,

108, 112, 113, 120n5, 121n2, 125n2; Blakean dialectic versus Hegelian dialectic, 21–3 – works: America (1793), 29, 33; The French Revolution (1791), 24, 25; Jerusalem (1804–20), 39; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–3), 25; Milton (1804–10), 30, 31–3; ‘The Sick Rose’ (1794), 54; ‘To Spring’ (1783), 56; ‘There is no Natural Religion’ (1788), 55 Bloom, Allan: The Closing of the American Mind (1987), 66 Bogdan, Deanne: ‘Northrop Frye and the Defence of the Imagination’ (1982), 10–11 Boyd, David, and Imre Salusinszky, eds.: Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works (1999), 3 Brandesi, Louis D(embitz), 72 Brooks, Cleanth: Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957), 46 Burnham, James: The Managerial Revolution (1942), 80–2; The Struggle for the World (1947), 80

132 Cayley, David, 18, 23 Clarke, Lorraine: Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic (1991), 21–3 Cold War, 17, 75, 77, 116–17 Communism. See Frye, Northrop: on Communism Cook, David: Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World (1985), 122–3n2 1 Corinthians, 54, 108, 111 Croce, Benedetto, 9 Cultural Left, 12–13, 115–17 Culture Wars, 13 Cummings, Peter: ‘Northrop Frye and the Necessary Hybrid: Criticism as Aesthetic Humanism’ (1971), 9–10 Cusset, François: French Theory (trans. 2008), 13, 115 Damon, S(amuel) Foster: A Blake Dictionary (1965), 96–7 Denham, Robert D., x, 4; ‘Frye and the Social Context of Criticism’ (1974), 10; Northrop Frye and Critical Method (1978), 119n5; Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World (2004), 5 Dewey, John, 72 Diderot, Denis, Le Neveu de Rameau (1761), 16 Dolzani, Michael: ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1999), 3–4 Donaldson, Jeffery, and Alan Mendelson, eds.: Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye (2004), 5 Eagleton, Terry, 115; Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), 45, 125n2

Index Ecclesiastes, Book of, 104 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns), 45; After Strange Gods (1934), 19; For Lancelot Andrews (1929), 45 Elliott, Larry: The Age of Insecurity (1998), 98 Ephesians, Epistle to the, 56 Erdman, David: Blake: Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (1954), 25–7 Fascism. See Frye, Northrop: on Fascism Flaubert, Gustav: Madame Bovary (1857), 46 French Revolution, 20, 76, 112 Frye, Northrop: accessible nature of his writings, 14–15; on achievement of Erdman, 25–6; on agape, 111–12; on Alexander the Great, 78; on American deism, 91, 123–4n3; on American liberalism, 91; on antisocial attitudes of modern writers, 16–18; anti-war stance of, 84–7, 93–4; on apocalyptic world, 5, 21, 41, 50–2, 57–9, 95–7, 107–11; on archetype, 48; on Matthew Arnold, 61, 72, 74–5, 123n5; on beauty, 6, 21, 26–7, 34, 35, 39, 42, 45, 47, 52, 59, 97, 113; on belief (or faith), 6, 8, 99– 101, 111–13; on Berger’s criticism of Blake, 25, 26; on the Bible, 32, 51, 52, 75, 92, 99–114; on Blake, 7, 54, 68, 125n2; Blakean post-partisan outlook defined, 6, 18–21 passim, 23; on Blake’s conception of cyclical nature of history, 20, 37; on Blake’s Eden, 21–3, 29–34, 39–42, 48, 51; on Blake’s Los, 19–23 pas-

Index sim, 27, 38, 113; on Blake’s Orc and Urizen, 19–23 passim, 27, 28–9, 35– 8 passim; on Blake’s Ulro, 21, 29–34 passim, 38, 39–42 passim, 48, 51, 57; on Bohemianism, 16; on Burke, 75; on James Burnham, 80–1, 83; on Thomas Carlyle, 62, 75; on central myth of literature, 29, 49–50; on Christ as a metaphor, 30, 31, 41, 52, 103, 108, 110; on the church, 95, 97, 99; on the Cold War, 67, 83–7, 93–4, 95–6; on Communism, 77–98 passim, 116, 124n6; on conception of original sin, 89–90; consistency of outlook, 14; critics on the literary theory of, 9–12; on cyclical nature of political attitudes to culture, 17– 18, 115–17; on Dadaism, 16; on democracy, 19, 66, 81, 82, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98; on demonic world, 50–2, 58–9, 108–11; dialectical and suprahistorical thinking defined, 5–6, 117; on dream, 20, 21, 22, 29, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 54, 65; on education as three-stage process, 65–8; on equality, 6, 8, 21, 40, 64, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 87–90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 112, 113; on T.S. Eliot, 17, 18, 19, 61; and end of history theses, 117; on Erdman’s criticism of Blake, 25–7; on ‘existential’ approach to Scripture, 101–3; on Fascism, 16, 17, 18, 63, 77–87 passim, 92, 94; on fraternity, 8, 90; on freedom (or liberty), 6, 7, 8, 21, 70– 3, 87–98 passim, 99, 112, 113; on ‘fundamental movements of narrative,’ 5; on Stefan George, 17; on Thomas Hardy, 31, 48; on G.W.F. Hegel, 22; on high mimetic mode,

133 17; on Adolf Hitler, 19, 82; on humanist conception of education, 61–4; on humanities versus sciences, 64, 68; on Robert Hutchins, 67; on identity as and identity with, 29–30, 33–4, 50–2, 110–11; on imagination, 33, 35, 54, 57, 59, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 92, 112; on indifference and anxiety, and detachment and concern, 64–5; influence of Blake on, 18–23; on innocence and experience, 5, 21, 22, 28, 37–9, 41, 55, 59; on interwar political situation and leading cultural figures of the time, 19; on ironic mode, 43; on laissezfaire and capitalism, 7, 45, 79–94 passim, 98, 114, 116–17, 124n6; on D.H. Lawrence, 16; on leisure class versus working class, 62, 63, 64, 68–9; on Wyndam Lewis, 16; liberalism of, 7–8, 64, 70–6, 90–8, 101, 112, 122–3n2; on literature as total form, 47–8; on Stéphane Mallarmé, 17; on managerialism, 80–3; on Karl Marx, 77, 78, 83, 94; on Marxism, 19, 46, 47, 67, 82, 85, 93, 94; on metaphorical and aesthetic nature of dianoia of Blake’s poetry, 29–34 passim; on metaphorical and aesthetic nature of dianoia of literature, 50–3; on metaphorical and socially engaged nature of dianoia of Blake’s poetry, 39–42; on metaphorical and socially engaged nature of dianoia of literature, 58–9; on mob and demagogic politics, 84–5, 88, 91; on William Morris, 62– 3; on myth versus ‘realism,’ 28; on mythical and aesthetic nature of narrative of Blake’s poetry, 28–9,

134 34; on mythical and aesthetic nature of narrative of literature, 48–50; mythical and socially engaged nature of dianoia literature, 53–6; on mythical and socially engaged nature of narrative of Blake’s poetry, 35–7; on Napoleon, 78; on the natural cycle in literature, 5, 48–9, 54–6; on New Criticism and New Critics, 43, 44, 45, 47, 125n2; on New Left, 67; on John Henry Newman, 61; on Isaac Newton, 96; and the ogdoad, 4; on George Orwell, 83; on Platonic conception of society, 61–2; post-partisan outlook in context, 14, 18; on Ezra Pound, 16, 17, 18, 19; on power, love, and wisdom, 8, 112, 113–14; on primary and secondary phases of education, 65–6; on Protestantism, 7–8, 19, 75, 95, 96, 99, 101, 112, 113, 114, 124n6; on the proto-socialist view of education, 62–4; on radical and humanist conceptions of society, 68–9; versus Ayn Rand, 114; on rationalism and anti-rationalism, 87–90; on Cecil Rhodes, 78; on Rilke, 17; on Alfred Rosenberg, 18; on Rousseau, 89–90; on Ruskin, 62; on Sartre, 100; on Second World War, 7, 83, 86, 92; secular dialectical thinking defined, 19–23; on seven phases of revelation in the Bible, 103–11; on social attitudes of modern writers, 16–17; on social reference of his own literary theory, 8; on Spanish Civil War, 19; on Spengler, 77–8; on Stalinism, 19; on subject–object

Index opposition, 34, 35–6, 53–6 passim; on Swinburne’s criticism of Blake, 24, 25, 27; on Symons’s criticism of Blake, 24–5, 27; on three revolutionary values, 72–3, 90; and ‘Third Book,’ 3–4; on a ‘third world war,’ 83–4, 86, 93; on totalitarianism, 19, 39, 89, 110; on ‘truth,’ 6, 21, 26–7, 35, 42, 45, 47, 52, 59, 97, 113; on unforeseen results of universal education and student protests, 66–7; on university education (or leisure), 6, 7, 8, 21, 60, 61–76, 91, 94, 97, 99, 100, 105, 123n5; on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, 17; on vision (or hope), 6, 8, 99–101, 111–13; on Wordsworth, 54; on work, 6, 7, 8, 21, 38, 39, 41, 63, 97, 99, 100; on W.B. Yeats, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 105 – works: ‘Academy without Walls’ (1961), 94–5; Anatomy of Criticism (1957), 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 17, 21, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50–2, 53, 55, 57, 59, 101, 110, 117, 118, 120n5, 121–2n6, 122n8, 125n2; ‘The Archetypes of Literature’ (1951), 29, 49, 121n6; ‘Baccalaureate Sermon’ (1967), 71; ‘Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype’ (1959), 19– 23, 27, 28, 30–1, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 48, 58, 95–6; ‘A Breath of Fresh Air’ (1980), 112; ‘By Liberal Things’ (1959), 86–7, 92; ‘The Changing Pace in Canadian Education’ (1963), 70; Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 3; The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939, vol. 1 (1996), 42; ‘The Church and Modern Culture’

Index (1950), 80, 81, 87–8; ‘The Church: Its Relation to Society’ (1949), 80–1, 82–3, 124n6; ‘Convocation Address, Franklin and Marshall’ (1968), 66, 67; ‘Convocation Address, University of British Columbia’ (1963), 73; Creation and Recreation (1980), 5, 53, 96; ‘The Critical Discipline’ (1960), 92; The Critical Path (1973), 10; ‘David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire’ (1955), 26; ‘The Day of Intellectual Battle: Reflections on Student Unrest’ (1969), 116; ‘The Definition of a University’ (1970), 66; ‘The Developing Imagination’ (1962), 65–6, 67, 68, 70, 74; ‘The Dialectic of Belief and Vision’ (1985), 100, 108, 111–12; The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955 (2001), 97; ‘The Double Mirror’ (1984), 101; The Double Vision (1991), 4, 14, 108; The Educated Imagination (1963), x, 8, 10, 11, 14, 47, 50, 54, 55, 56–8, 59, 68; ‘Education and the Humanities’ (1947), 64; ‘Education and the Rejection of Reality’ (1971), 67, 70; ‘Education – Protection Against Futility’ (1964), 96; ‘Elementary Teaching and Elementary Scholarship’ (1963), 125n2; Fables of Identity (1963), 8, 19, 45; Fearful Symmetry (1947), 3, 7, 8, 10, 20, 29, 35, 36, 48, 54, 112, 120n5; Foreword to English Studies at Toronto (1988), 45; The Great Code (1982), 7, 22, 28, 51, 53, 99, 101, 102; ‘Hart House Rededicated’ (1969), 85; ‘History and Myth in the Bible’ (1976), 28, 101, 102, 103, 104–11 passim; ‘Humani-

135 ties in a New World’ (1958), 64; ‘The Instruments of Mental Production’ (1966), 61–2, 64, 65, 69; Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), 18, 23; ‘The Keys to the Gates’ (1966), 41; ‘A Liberal Education’ (1945), 92; ‘The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris’ (1982), 62, 63, 72–3; The Modern Century (1967), 16–17, 85; A Natural Perspective (1965), 8; ‘Notes for a Commentary on Milton’ (1957), 30, 31–3, 41; ‘Oswald Spengler’ (1955), 77, 78; ‘The Present Condition of the World’ (1943), 86, 123–4n3; Preface to On Education (1988), 63; ‘Preserving Human Values’ (1961), 72, 83, 88, 90; ‘The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century’ (1964), 74–5, 123n5; ‘Repetitions of Jacob’s Dream’ (1983), 53, 83; The Return of Eden (1965), 56; ‘A Revolution Betrayed’ (1970), 70– 1, 72; ‘The Search for Acceptable Words’ (1973), 18–19; ‘The Social Importance of Literature’ (1968), 67; ‘Spengler Revisited’ (1974), 94; The Stubborn Structure (1970), 8, 14; ‘The Teacher’s Source of Authority’ (1978), 62, 68, 69; ‘On Teaching Literature’ (1972), 122n6; T.S. Eliot: An Introduction (1963), 9; ‘Trends in Modern Culture’ (1952), 6, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 88–9, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 112; ‘Toynbee and Spengler’ (1847), 50; The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), 8; ‘William Blake (I)’ (1957), 24–7; Words with Power (1990), 4, 15, 16, 22, 56, 118

136 Galatians, Epistle to the, 110 Genesis, Book of, 92 Gitlin, Todd: Twilight of Common Dreams (1996), 117 Good, Graham: Humanism Betrayed (2001), 63, 122n1 Great Depression, 92 Green, Thomas Hill, 72 Hart, Jonathan: Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (1994), 7, 119–20n5 Hebrews, Epistle to the, 111 Hegel, G(eorg) W(ilhelm) F(riedrich), 21–2; Hegelian dialectic versus Blakean dialectic, 21–3; Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), 22 Hobhouse, L(eonard) T(rewlany), 72 Hunter, James Davidson: Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991), 13 Ideology criticism, 115 Industrial Revolution, 78, 79 James, Book of, 32 Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), 33 Kee, James, ed.: Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word (2002), 5 Kelly, David: A Life of One’s Own (1996), 71–2 Kemp, Helen, 42 Koterski, Joseph: ‘How Jefferson Honored Religion’ (2001), 124n3 Kronman, Anthony T(ownsend): Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007), 13

Index Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert), 16; The Plumed Serpent (1926), 16 Lentricchia, Frank: After the New Criticism (1980), 44 Levine, George: ‘Our Culture and Our Convictions’ (1972), 122 Lewis, Wyndham, 16, 19, Long, Douglas: ‘Northrop Frye: Liberal Humanism and the Critique of Ideology’ (2000), 63 Luke, Gospel of, 69 Marxism, 115. See also Frye, Northrop: on Karl Marx; on Marxism Mendelson, Alan, ed.: Frye and the Word (2004), 5 Milton, John: Paradise Lost (1667), 31 Multiculturalism Act (1988), 98 New Critics, 45, 47, 53, 125n2 New Left, 12, 13, 67, 115 Newman, Cardinal John Henry: The Idea of a University (1852 and 1858), 73 New Right, 12–13, 116–17 Nixon, Richard, 116 O’Grady, Jean: ‘Frye and the Church’ (2004), 97 Orwell, George, 80, 84, 92; ‘Burnham’s View of the Contemporary World Struggle’ (1947), 80; ‘England Your England’ (1941), 86; ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940), 92–3; ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ (1945), 94; 1984 (1949), 83, 84 Phillips, Kevin: American Theocracy (2006), 12–13

Index Plato, 9, 11 Pound, Ezra, 16, 17, 18, 19 Proverbs, Book of, 105 Psalms, 104 Rand, Ayn, 114 Ransom, John Crowe, 45 Rationalism versus anti-rationalism, 87 Reagan, Ronald, 116, 117 Reaganism, 13 Reign of Terror, 20 Reinhartz, Adele (Board ed.): Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word (2002), 5 Revelation, Book of, 30, 31, 103, 104, 107 Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong), 9 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 17 Rosenberg, Alfred: Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), 18 Salusinszky, Imre: ‘Frye and Ideology’ (1994), 12, 47, 115–16; ed., Rereading Frye (1999), 3 Sartre, Jean-Paul: Being and Nothingness (1943), 105 Shakespeare, William: King Lear (1603), 36 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11 Sidney, Philip, 11 Sinclair, Upton: Mammonart (1924), 46 Slan, Jan: ‘Writing in Canada: Innis,

137 McLuhan, and Frye: Frontiers of Canadian Criticism’ (1972), 10 Socio-realist tradition of literary criticism, 46–7 Spanish Civil War, 19 Spengler, Oswald: The Decline of the West (trans. 1926), 49–50, 77–8 Students for a Democratic Society, 67 Swinburne, Algernon Charles: William Blake (1868), 24–5, 44 Symons, Arthur: William Blake (1907), 24–5 Trudeau, Pierre, 97–8 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Comte Auguste, 17 Watergate scandal, 12 Whitehead, Alfred North, 68 Wilde, Oscar, 9, 63 Wimsatt, William K.: ‘Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth’ (1966), 8–9, 12; Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957), 46 Wordsworth, William, 54 World War II, 7, 83, 86, 92 Yeats, W.B., 16, 17, 18, 19; Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), 24 Zola, Émile François, 46