Book Reviews

Book Reviews Robert D. Denham, editor. Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. 445 pp. $95. Engines of understanding Does literature have a social function? If so, what? Or—wait—that’s a stupid question. Literature must have a social function—otherwise, why would it exist—and in every culture in human history? But if literature has a social function, what is it? What is literature “for”? Then there is that other question: What is literature, anyway? If “literature” is a legitimate category, something that corresponds to a reality, then what characterizes it? Or is the category just a mystification, a kind of illusion? Academics are not that interested in these questions. But the questions are there, in the manner of the elephant in the room. In the manner of the elephant in the room, to ignore it just makes it more pressing, especially if you happen to make your living in the field. What is the social function of literature/ English studies? Why have English departments? After years of “austerity,” these are now “existential questions,” even if no one seems too interested. In fact, despite decades of New Historicism, no one knows much about the relation between trends in literary study and socio-economic-political ESC 42.1–2 (March/June 2016): 233–258 context. But at least one major figure spent a career on the “existential questions”: Northrop Frye. This collection offers plentiful evidence of Frye’s interest. But Frye himself is now an elephant in the room, someone who is there but not there—a strange figure, an outsider in literary/cultural studies, whose ideas are now rejected but were never really absorbed or digested. Frye is arguably the most original thinker Canada has produced.1 His impact from 1950 to 1975 was enormous. That influence screeched to a halt in the late 1970s. New Historicists would notice the timing—a criti- cal historical moment: the end of the “golden age” of capitalism follow- ing World War II. Then followed stagnation. For about 90 percent of the population real wages today are what they were in the mid-70s, despite unprecedented gains in productivity.2 The 1 percent extracted unprecedented wealth. But for most, stagnation deepens—indebtedness balloons. In the postwar period, incomes grew; social democracy was normative, with provision of education and health care and infrastructure and spend- ing on the arts as well as on university research. That was Frye’s period: a rebellious period in which words like “liberation,” “vision,” and “imagination”—Frye words—had actual social force. “The aim of education” he wrote, is “to make people maladjusted,” “to destroy their notions that what society” does makes “sense.”3 There remains a hardy group of “Frye specialists,” but it’s small and they tend to treat Frye as a humanist-philosopher—not someone whose ideas one builds upon or applies. In other words, not as a thinker to use, not as an approach for analysis more generally, in the way that one might use Bourdieu or Benjamin or Butler or Eisenstein. That is, they view Frye as an object of study rather than, as he would have preferred, as a method—as presenting a way of thinking. Their concern is naturally with questions like: Is he compatible with Derrida? (He’s not.4) Frye specialists produce 1 See the special sections on Frye of H&L Hamilton Arts & Letters, especially Adamson’s “Maladjusting Us: Frye, Education, and the Real Form of Society.” 2 See my “Fuck Austerity” for some details. 3 Quoted with discussion in my review of Northrop Frye’s Writings on Educa- tion, 379. 4 Of course, if one works at it, contacts can be made between Derrida and Frye. Derrida’s central conception is “aporia” (“pathlessness”—undecidability): not a Frygian conception. In Derrida, as in so much of deconstruction, everything is separate from everything else: “Tout autre est tout autre” in Derrida’s dictum (Aporias 73), whereas for Frye everything is connected to everything else. The French philosopher that Frye really has something in common with is Maurice 234 | Nicholson valuable work,5 but specialists tend to write for specialists. Meanwhile, the mainstream of English studies—if there is a mainstream—long ago decided that Frye and his “myth criticism” were wrong6 and has exiled him and his “myth criticism,” putting Frye in a category somewhat like Frazer or Spengler or possibly Jung—idiosyncratic intellectuals without real scholarly validity, despite flashes of brilliance. Still, the very fact that interest persists is significant. Economic stagnation, our New Historicist would notice, coincided with the tidal wave known as deconstruction, which swept through literary studies by the late 1970s. Then, equally suddenly, the New Historicism (soon indistinguishable from the old historicism, with sociological/gender adaptations) arrived, displacing deconstruction from its throne. Decon- struction continues to fascinate, thanks to a cohort of graduate students trained in its outlook, students who got the last of the jobs before they dried up. But New Historicism remains hegemonic in English studies—if “English studies” can be accurately defined today by anyone. Frye is remote to graduate students or young academics (if there are any young academics, given the vanishing job market and declining English Major). Yet Frye is still there, his ideas largely unexplored, untapped. After thirty volumes of Collected Works, Uncollected Prose is full of interest even if you aren’t a Frye completist. Robert Denham’s editing is impeccable; his introduction furnishes a guide to readers who may not enjoy Frye’s plot summaries of, for instance, some of the lesser-known novels of Walter Scott. But even Frye’s notes to himself—even for a talk about the stained glass windows at Victoria College—or his detailed summaries of Scott—are interesting. Frye was a stylist, a talented writer who produced memorable one-liners effortlessly. His personal notes—acer- bic, sometimes scatological—have a vitality critics rarely match. Frye is unusual as a theorist because he appreciated humour and could be very funny. He understood wit not as decorative but as a means of communi- cating insight—and not about showing how clever one is. But what matters in this collection, as in Frye generally, is the “conceptual mythology,” as Frye himself called it. By “conceptual mythology” Merleau-Ponty. But Merleau-Ponty, after a period of intense interest, has, like Frye, sort of faded from the scene. 5 Particularly impressive is the work of Glen Robert Gill. 6 See Robert Denham for a brief survey of critics who dismiss Frye and treat his ideas in a reductive, caricatured manner. There is something about Frye that provokes anxiety, not just hostility, as I have argued elsewhere. Reviews | 235 Frye meant primarily the image-assumptions that people take for granted without realizing, image-assumptions that shape their thought, including the most rarefied theorists. Frye shows that thinking is not the same as abstract reasoning. People think in images, not just in abstract ideas. This thinking-in-images is the focus of his work: Frye is one of the few theorists who take imagination seriously—imagination as a form of intellection in its own right, with its own logic and forms of expression. The basis of this logic is metaphor, the identification of two different things with each other: A = B. Frye constantly worked with these metaphor-theorems. Metaphor is equivalent for imagination to the equation in mathematics: the basic means of construction and intellection, the engine of understanding. Literature, as the expression of metaphor, constitutes a category—a species—with recurring characteristics; hence every work of literature has more in common with every other work of literature than it has with the social context that produced it, just as birds have more in common with other birds—just as words have more in common with other words. Furthermore, just as birds come out of birds, literature comes out of literature. This does not mean—of course—that literary works do not have crucial reference to the societies that created them—Frye never denied that. But it does mean that they can only be understood by relating literary works to one another—not just to the people who made them. This point has been endlessly misunderstood and caricatured, like so much of Frye’s complex, subtle, and profound thought. For Frye literature does have a social function: human liberation. We create what we live in and have the power to change it. For Frye, reality exists in time rather than in space. Hence everything is a process of trans- formation-in-time. In this respect he was close to Hegel (and to Marx— Arbeitszeit—closer than he realized). In Frye, a text is a focus of swirling forces—not a static object. The reason why every work of literature is connected to every other work of literature is, finally, that everything is connected to everything else—nothing is an isolated entity.7 As Hegel said, “The truth is the whole.” This new collection gives further reason why we need to take another look at Frye. Mervyn Nicholson Thompson Rivers University 7 It’s hard to imagine anything further from Frye than the oft-quoted dictum of Paul de Man, the high priest of deconstruction: “Nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death is due to the randomness of its occurrence” (122). 236 | Nicholson Works Cited Adamson, Joseph. “Maladjusting Us: Frye, Education, and the Real Form of Society.” HA&L Hamilton Arts and Letters 8.1 (2015).

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