Anatomy of Criticism with a New Foreword by Harold Bloom ANATOMY of CRITICISM
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Anatomy of Criticism With a new foreword by Harold Bloom ANATOMY OF CRITICISM Four Essays Anatomy of Criticism FOUR ESSAYS With a Foreword by Harold Bloom NORTHROP FRYE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY Copyright © 1957, by Princeton University Press All Rights Reserved L.C. Card No. 56-8380 ISBN 0-691-06999-9 (paperback edn.) ISBN 0-691-06004-5 (hardcover edn.) Fifteenth printing, with a new Foreword, 2000 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University, and the Class of 1932 Lectureship. FIRST PRINCETON PAPERBACK Edition, 1971 Third printing, 1973 Tenth printing, 1990 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) {Permanence of Paper) www.pup.princeton.edu 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 Printed in the United States of America HELENAE UXORI Foreword NORTHROP FRYE IN RETROSPECT The publication of Northrop Frye's Notebooks troubled some of his old admirers, myself included. One unfortunate passage gave us Frye's affirmation that he alone, of all modern critics, possessed genius. I think of Kenneth Burke and of William Empson; were they less gifted than Frye? Or were George Wilson Knight or Ernst Robert Curtius less original and creative than the Canadian master? And yet I share Frye's sympathy for what our current "cultural" polemicists dismiss as the "romantic ideology of genius." In that supposed ideology, there is a transcendental realm, but we are alienated from it. The genius is a person at least more open to that transcendence than most of us are. Historicists assert that genius is only an eighteenth-century idea, in which the saint and the hero were replaced, as they were by Goethe, widely renowned as "the genius of happiness and astonish ment." There had been at least three earlier meanings of genius: one's attendant spirit or natural endowment or aspiration. Frye's declaration of genius prompts me to an impish archaism: was this Magus of the North attended by a spirit? It seems likelier that Frye, a formidable ironist, would refer to his aspiration, more even than to his natural endowment. I fell in love with Frye's Fearful Symmetry, his study of William Blake, when it was published in 1947, my freshman year at Cornell. I purchased the book and read it to pieces, until it was a part of me. A decade later, when Anatomy of Criticism was published, I became one of its first reviewers. I am not so fond of the Anatomy now, as I was more than forty years ago, but I probably absorbed it in ways I no longer can apprehend. In later years, whenever I lectured at Toronto, Frye would introduce me with considerable polemical fer vor, making clear that his Methodist Platonism was very different from my Jewish Gnosticism. I place this upon record, since I have come to praise Frye in this foreword, though with a certain ambiva lence. Frye disliked the idea of an anxiety of influence, and told me that whether a later writer experienced such an affect was due en tirely to temperament and circumstances. When I replied that influ ence anxiety was not an affect in a person, but the relation of one literary work to another, and so the result, rather than the cause, of a strong misreading, my heroic precursor stopped listening. He had vii FOREWORD formulated a Myth of Concern, his version of Shelley's notion that imaginative literature was one vast poem with many authors, and so the matter was settled. Borges, going beyond Shelley, suggested that all authors were one author anyway, named Shakespeare. As extreme literary Idealism, that is extravagant enough for me to accept (some times) more readily than I can entertain Frye's Myth of Concern. Frye began as a rebel against the Formalist schools of criticism that dominated Anglo-American academies in the 1940s and 1950s: the Aristotle-influenced theorists of Chicago, and the more practical New Critics of T. S. Eliot's various persuasions, including his High Church Neo-Christianity. As a young scholar starting to teach at Yale in the mid-fifties, I welcomed Frye as a sage who, unlike most of the Yale faculty in literary study, did not believe that T. S. Eliot was Christ's vicar upon earth. All this is now quaint: Frye and his opponents have been folded together, as antique Modernists inun dated by the counter-cultural flood of feminists, queer theorists, sub- Marxists, semioticians, and the ambitious disciples of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and other Parisian prophets. Aesthetic and other cognitive values doubtless still exist, but not in the universities, where the new multiculturalists denounce the aesthetic as a colo nialist and patriarchal mask. Poetry, demystified, has been leveled. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is taught more frequently than Robert Browning, and Charlotte Armstrong has obscured William Words worth. As we turn into the new century, I wonder if I should sum mon up Frye at a séance, to ask him if he still feels that overt value judgments have no place in criticism? What would he say when told that Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Lady Mary Chudleigh have usurped the eminence of John Milton and Andrew Marvell? His high sense of irony doubtless would sustain him, even when informed that Shakespeare's plays were shaped, not by a highly individual imagination, but by the same "social ener gies" that molded the dramas of George Chapman and Philip Mas- singer. All this will pass (not soon enough) and the study of genius will return, though doubtless in modes unknown to Frye, or to me. Anatomy of Criticism, in this year 2000, is not much of a guide to our current wilderness; yet, what is? Frye, setting aside the question of his genius, moves me still be cause his blend of Protestant Dissent and Platonism is securely al lied to what remains strongest in our poetic tradition. I am well viii FOREWORD aware that "our" is a very vulnerable term, when all difficult poets, who require mediation, are in considerable jeopardy. Blake's Jerusa lem, like Paradise Lost and King Lear, is regarded as "sexist" by feminist sectaries. Frye, expounding on Blake's vision of the Female Will, is no longer an acceptable exegete to many who call them selves apostles of that Will. The "good old days," in fact, were not so good: universities, in my youth, were staffed mostly by an assemblage of know-nothing bigots, academic impostors, inchoate rhapsodes, and time-serving trim mers, while Neo-Christian ideologues were no wiser than the cur rent commissars of Cultural Studies. And yet literary study, in what I am prepared to call the Age of Frye, nevertheless flourished. Stu dents were taught to read closely, and what they read indeed was the best that had been written. I fretted that Paradise Lost frequently was reduced to the Mere Christianity of C. S. Lewis, and I was even more annoyed that T. S. Eliot first exiled Milton (and the Roman tics, and Victorians) and later reinstated Paradise Lost and its de scendants. Frye, reviewing the Eliotic Allen Tate, charmed me by calling Eliot's critical vision the Great Western Butterslide, in which a large blob of Christian, Classical, and Royalist butter melted down and congealed at last into The Waste Land. I enjoyed also Frye's observation that Eliot and Pound had emerged from Missouri and Idaho to announce that the true tradition of English poetry proceeded from origins in medieval Provence and Italy through later developments in France. One learned from Frye to be wary of extra-poetic persuasions, particularly those that founded their Modernism upon a rather shal low rejection of Romanticism. And yet Frye had essentially irenic tendencies; when I first met him, in London in 1958, I urged him on to fiercer battles against High Church Modernists, but to no avail. As a Low Church minister (United Church of Canada) he shared the Blakean belief that Error would expose itself, and then self-destruct. Since I was, in his explicit view, a Judaizer of Blake, he assured me that Blake's symmetries counted for more than the Blakean Apocalypse. I do not wish to over-emphasize Frye's pieties: when I asked what he did as a minister, he dryly answered that he married and buried his students. Symmetries abound in Anatomy of Criticism, and mount into ob sessive patterns in his large Biblical studies The Great Code and ix FOREWORD Words with Power. Fonder than Frye was of Hermetic tradition, I once compared him in print to the neo-Platonists Proclus and Iamblichus. Though my comparison was amiable enough, he thun dered down from Toronto that those worthies were neither Chris tians nor first-raters. Belatedly, I revise the similitude now to Plotinus, distinctly not a Christian but certainly not second-rate. Frye's precursors were the poets rather than Plato: Milton and Blake had found him, and would not let him go. Yet, he became a literary critic and not a poet, perhaps in the conviction that an Age of Criti cism could produce a Milton of exegesis. Such figures exist in the great scholars of esotericism: Hans Jonas, Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin, and Moshe Idel. I suspect, though, that the relation be tween imaginative literature and its best critics is rather different. I do not agree wholly with the contention of the learned Christopher Ricks, that the English critics who matter most are the poet-critics: Ben Jonson, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.