N. Frye, "Levels of Meaning in Literature"

Levels of Meaning in Literature Author(s): Northrop Frye Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1950), pp. 246-262 Published by: Kenyon College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4333140 Accessed: 10/09/2009 14:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=kenyon. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Kenyon Review. http://www.jstor.org Northrop Frye, “Levels of Meaning in Literature,” The Kenyon Review 12, no. 2 (1950): 246-62. Northrop Frye LEVELSOF MEANING IN LITERATURE THE longer one has been familiar with a great work of literature, the more one's understandingof it grows. It would be hard to formulate a more elementary principle of literary experience. Its plain implication, that literature has different levels of meaning, was made the basis of a systematic development of criticism in the Middle Ages, and a precise scheme of four levels of meaning-the literal, the allegorical, the tropological or moral, and the anagogic-was worked out and adopted by many great medieval writers, notably Dante. Modern criticism has not only ignored this, but seems to regard the problem of meaning in literature as merely an offshoot of the corresponding semantic problem in current philosophy. In offering a few suggestions about the possibility of a modern restatement of the medieval theory, I propose to by-pass the philosophical questions involved, on the ground that the obvious place to start looking for a theory of literary meaning is in literature. The First Level. Let us start with the word "symbol,"confining ourselves to verbal symbols. A symbol ordinarily implies at least two things, A, the symbol proper, and B, the thing represented or symbolized by it. With verbal symbols particularly, however, there seems to be a locus or path of signification which passes through a number of B's. The verbal symbol "cat" is a group of black marks on a page representing a noise with the mouth which represents an idea called up from experience of an animal that says meow. A verbal NORTHROPFRYE 247 symbol may be of any size: a word, a letter, a phrase, a sentence, or even larger word-groups may be symbols. The total verbal structure,the poem or the book, may be regarded also as a single symbol-complex.But whenever we attempt to answer the question, what does this symbol or symbol-complex symbolize? we find ourselves travelling a centrifugal path from the verbal structureto a realm of experience outside it. We find this more difficult at some times than at others. It is easy enough to say, up to a point, what "cat" symbolizes, even what each of the three letters in it symbolizes. It is harder to say what the word "of" symbolizes, or the final letter of the word "lamb." Here we have to enlarge our unit of symbolism to give an intelligible answer, and in the process we become aware of another direction of meaning, a direction not centrifugal this time but centripetal, not running outward into experience but inward into the total meaning of the verbal structure. The word "of," we say, has not, like a noun, a direct one-to-one correspond- ence with a thing symbolized: one has first to relate it to other words. But it is clear that the same syntactic aspect of meaning is relevant even to nouns. If a writer uses the word "cat," that verbal symbol represents, in addition to its centrifugal locus of meaning, a portion of the author's total intention in putting it there. Its meaning in the verbal structure cannot be understood without relating it to the structure as a whole. Nor can we ultimately interpose even the "author's intention" between the verbal symbol and the verbal structure, for the author's intention ceases to exist as a separate factor as soon as his verbal structureis fixed. Centripetally, then, the verbal symbol does not represent anything except its own place in the verbal structure. We said that the latter may also be regarded as a single symbol-complex.But from the centripetal point of view, in which the unit of symbolism is to be considered only in terms of its place in the total verbal structure, the total verbal structureitself does not "mean" anything except itself. 248 KENYONREVIEW Most uses of the term "literal," whether medieval or modern, fail to make this distinction between the syntactic and the repre- sentative relations of a unit of symbolism. I do not understand the common assertion that the verbal symbol "cat" "means literally" a cat, the animal that says meow. It is surely obvious that the verbal symbol stands in a descriptive and representativerelation- ship to actual cats. Dante says, in commenting on the verse in the Psalms, "When Israel came out of Egypt": "For should we con- sider the letter only, the exit of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is what is signified to us." But an historical event cannot be literally anything but an historical event; a prose narrative describing it cannot be literally anything but a prose narrative. In taking his example from the Bible, Dante per- haps felt the necessity of making first of all a respectful genuflec- tion to theological rationalism:in any case there is no such pseudo- literal basis to his own Commedia. The literal level of meaning, though it takes precedence over all other meanings, lies outside the province of criticism. Under- standing a verbal structure literally is the incommunicableact of total apprehension which precedes criticism. The preliminary effort to unite the symbols in a verbal structure,and the Gestalt perception of the unity of the structure which results, are the closest we can come to describing the literal level. Every genuine response to art, whether critically formulated or not, must begin in the same way, in a complete surrenderof the mind and senses to the impact of the work of art as a whole. This occupies the same place in criticismthat observation,the direct exposure of the mind to nature, has in the scientific method. "Every poem must necessarily be a perfect unity," says Blake: this, as the wording implies, is not a judgment of value on existing poems, but a defini- tion of the hypothesiswhich every readermust adopt in first trying to comprehend even the most chaotic poem ever written. In the theory outlined at the end of Joyce's Portrait, the first of the three attributesof beauty, integritas, correspondsto our literal level. NORTHROPFRYE 249 The Second Level. When we say that such a complex verbal structurehas "meaning," we usually refer to the vast disordered tangle of centrifugal meanings running in all directions from its words and phrases. By the time we have apprehendedthe integritas or literal significance, we have recapitulatedour whole education in centrifugal meaning, back to our earliest attempts to read. But after we have understood a verbal structure literally, we have then to relate it as a whole to the body of data which it represents. This process introduces the conception "literary" to our dis- cussion of verbal structures. Verbal structureswhich are not "literary" are primarily descriptions of facts or truths external to themselves. What interests, say, a scientist or an historian about words is their accuracyin reproducingscientific or historical data. But one of the most familiar phenomena in the "literary"group is the absence of this controlling aim of descriptive accuracy. We should prefer to feel that an historical dramatist was capable of reading and using his sources accurately,and would not alter them without good reason. But that such good reasons may exist in literature is not denied by anyone, although they seem to exist only there. Literature,poetry especially, may always be recognized by the negative test of the possibility of departing from facts. Hence the words denoting literary structure,"fable," "myth," and "fiction,"have acquireda secondarysense of untruth, like the Nor- wegian word for poet, digter, which also means liar. Sir Philip Sidney remarkedthat "the poet never affirmeth,"and therefore cannot be said to lie. Literaturepresents, not an affirm- ation or repudiation of facts, but a series of hypothetical pos- sibilities. The appearanceof a ghost in Hamzletdoes not owe its dramatic appeal to the question whether ghosts exist or not, or whether Shakespeare or his audience thought they did. Shake- speare'sonly postulate is, "let there be a ghost in Hamlet." In this the poet resembles the mathematician rather than his verbal col- leagues in history and science.

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