Panoptic vision
GRAHAM HOUGH
The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society Northrop Frye (Methuen 60s) Since the Eliot-Richards-Leavis-Empson explosion in the earlier part of the century, Northrop Frye has been the most original and stimulating critic of our time. Coming on the scene in the late 'forties, when a rather tired old New Criticism still held undisputed sway. Frye made an impression of striking novelty and power. I still believe, despite a good deal of contrary evidence, that criticism must give pleasure as well as assailing its readers with argument, if it is to effect any lasting change in literary habits. In Frye's Blake study and in Anatomy of Criticism there is a genial imaginative sweep that makes them a joy to read as well as a demanding exercise to follow; and no one who has given them the attention they deserve can be left with his view of literature unchanged. It is not the judgment of individual works and authors that is in question, for Frye is not a revaluer: it is the sense of literary history as a continuous field, its articulations and interconnections. More than that, Frye has almost created for our day the non-historical sense of literature as a co-existing whole—not a chance assemblage but an all- comprehending structure, the total dream of
man. Wide panoptic visions of this kind are usually the work of a whole culture, not of an individual; but Frye's is very largely his • own, and where it has imposed itself it has done so with very little help from the general climate of thought.
The Stubborn Structure is a collection of essays, most of which are developments or epitomes of themes already outlined in earlier work. Since Anatomy of Criticism in 1957 Frye has published studies of Shakespearian comedy, Spenser and Milton. Even these look like further illustrations of ideas that in essentials he had already established, and it is not unfair to regard all the rest of his later writing as a set of footnotes to previous work. It was the study of Blake that gave him his lead-in to the interpretation of literary symbolism. Some time after this he seems to have had a vision of the European imagination at work, a vision that includes all literary types, all genres, in a huge encyclopaedic scheme. I say vision advisedly, for although Frye is a 'great schematiser (at times indeed he recalls some mediaeval encyclopaedist) it is not the spirit of classification that moves him, but the sense of a great closely articulated organic whole; and his earlier and more substantial work is not an aid to academic study but an imaginative construction in its own right. Like most visions however it was a thing that occurred once and for all. It can be partly recovered, elaborated and glossed, but it never seems to have appeared again in its original brightness. Any reader of Frye will be glad to have these essays; they offer compendious versions of what he already knows, or fuller discussions of still discussable points, but they also bring a sense of disappointment. They are repetitions, with a good deal less brilliance and verve than the originals.
The first group of essays in the book is mostly concerned with the place of the humanities in our general mental economy, and the kind of knowledge that the humanities can bring. Some of the old insights are still present, but at times we get pretty near to the banalities of the ceremonial lecture. One of the challenging points in the Anatomy was the contention that value-judgments are not an important part of the business of criticism. Another essay argues this case again, with less wit and panache than the original formulation. One of the Blake pieces is in effect a useful résumé of that brilliant and difficult book Fearful Symmetry. A good deal of this book is concerned in one way or another with education, and the dull grey cloud that attends the discussion of that topic hovers sadly over the whole. A curious unreality too. The hopes that Frye entertains for education in the English-speaking world to which he belongs are daily contradicted at every turn. But this seems to make little impression on him. It has not escaped his attention that the state of Western society leaves something to be desired; but he thinks that the balance can be corrected by the universities. He speaks of the 'real society' in contrast with the transient and disorderly simulacrum in which we actually live:
'Real society can only be the world re- vealed to us through the study of the arts and sciences, the total body of human achievement out of which the forces come that change ordinary society so rapidly. Of this world universities are the social embodiment, and they represent what seems to me today the only visible direction in which our higher loyalties and obligations can go.'
There was always a strong will to believe in Frye's writing; but a man who can believe that today can believe anything, and it is hard to find any satisfaction in so implausible a faith. We can still be grateful for the vestiges of the earlier Northrop Frye, the brilliant champion of the ordered world of the imagination.
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