Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism

the ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate

An extra post for this week, in anticipation of the debut exactly seven days from now of The Invisible College. I sometimes repost to Substack old essays of mine from johnpistelli.com’s eight-year archive for special occasions—often, alas, for the deaths of major authors—and I’m reposting one today. There’s no special occasion, but I was talking about Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947) in my last Weekly Reading, and I expect I’ll discuss it further in The Invisible College’s first episode.

It’s a good time, then, to revisit my essay from 2015 on Frye’s masterpiece, perhaps the most heady and holistic of all works of 20th-century literary theory, The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Since I first read it in full in 2015—I’d read excerpts before—I’ve taken to saying that it’s probably my favorite work of criticism or theory. At the peak of Merve Emre discourse in mid-2023, I heard her say on a podcast that the one book of criticism she’d take with her to the proverbial desert island would be Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. That’s an excellent choice: I’d consider it myself (I wrote about it here). But I would probably go with The Anatomy of Criticism in the end.

Regular readers might be surprised to see me endorse a work that proposes to make literary criticism a science, since I often show a certain Romantic contempt for science, but readers of Fearful Symmetry will see that what Frye meant by science at its best is what Blake meant by it, and Blake, let us recall, judged Locke, Newton, and Bacon the arch-villains of modernity:

Very little of the machinery science makes possible is of any use to the imagination…and what is not of use to the imagination must be useful to the natural man, and so destructive. Science conceived as will is a murderous complication of such machines; science conceived as imagination is scientia, the clarifying form of our knowledge of nature. This latter, when under imaginative control, is of great significance…

Frye wrote scientia, then, not science, Regular readers may also be surprised to find my affinity for this system-building critic, since I personally hate systems, can never hold them in my mind, and am able to respond at all only to emotive rhetoric. And it’s true that I will never master Frye’s absurdly elaborate system—I include just one chart below as illustration—just as Borges said he would never walk every street in Joyce’s Dublin, but I find it a sublime and enlivening aesthetic experience all the same. If this isn’t a far-fetched analogy, it’s similar to the way we read Hammett and Chandler for the noir atmosphere and not for the incomprehensible plot.

According to Frye, and this is obvious from Fearful Symmetry, he got the idea for The Anatomy from Blake, though anyone casually acquainted with Frye’s ideas would make more superficial connections with Jung or Joseph Campbell. But these latter (I think) lack the Romantic dynamism and revolutionary energy so manifest in Frye that even Fredric Jameson had to purloin it for his postmodern reinvention of Marxism in The Political Unconscious.

Frye’s work is politically fascinating, a psychedelic Romantic defense of liberalism that should appeal in the present, given the failure (so far) of this century’s radical and reactionary movements. As he wrote in a 1969 preface to Fearful Symmetry:

Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say.

I know in my announcement essay for The Invisible College I derided rivals who spend too much time talking about theorists and philosophers, but it would at least be amusing if we could meme Frye into being for extra-institutional artists and thinkers in the second half of the 2020s what Marshall McLuhan and René Girard were for the first half.¹

Frye is akin to both his contemporaries. Like his University of Toronto colleague McLuhan, he is a prodigious midcentury generalist rising out of the perhaps unexpected world of Canadian literary studies to prophesy a theory-of-everything that would prove congruent with the “cosmic consciousness” of the 1960s. Like Girard, his theory-of-everything is a modernist renovation of Christianity based on defeating the sacrificial logic underlying all war and oppression.²

But unlike McLuhan, who makes media a master-category subsuming all culture, and unlike Girard, who likewise subordinates culture to Catholic religious anthropology, Frye upholds, paradoxically, both the autonomy of literature and literature’s ability and promise to save the world.³

If we look back at Elizabethan scholars, with their rhetorical textbooks and mythological handbooks, their commentaries on Plutarch and Ovid and their allegorical interpretations of Homer and Virgil, we may see that when Chapman spoke of “not onely all learning, gouerment, and wisedome being deduc’t as from a bottomlesse fountaine from him [Homer], but all wit, elegancie, disposition, and iudgement,” he meant exactly what he said. It is merely an attempt to complete the humanist revolution, then, to point out that the conception of the Classical in art and the conception of the scriptural or the canonical in religion have always tended to approximate one another; that the closer the approximation, the healthier it is for both religion and art; the on this approximation the authority of humane letters has always rested, and that the sooner they are identified with each other the better. Such a culture would absorb not only the Classical but all other cultures into a single visionary synthesis, deepen and broaden the public response to art, deliver the artist from the bondage of a dingy and nervous naturalism called, in a term which is a little masterpiece of question-begging, “realism,” and restore to him the catholicity of outlook that Montaigne and Shakespeare possessed.⁴

Please enjoy, then, my essay, originally posted in 2015, recommending The Anatomy of Criticism to all students of literature. The review has been very lightly edited, and I added a very long quotation from the book that I’d initially relegated to my Tumblr side-blog. And please subscribe for The Invisible College!

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Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism

Originally published on johnpistelli.com on October 15, 2015

Robert D. Denham

If I had to choose one book as the foundation for an education in literary criticism and theory, I might choose Anatomy of Criticism; I wish I had read it much earlier. Even if one’s goal were the deconstruction of the concept of literature, this might be the most productive text to deconstruct, because Frye intends his theory as the climax and (to use his typological Biblical language) fulfillment of all prior western literary theory from Aristotle to Eliot.

In his “Polemical Introduction,” Frye rejects prevailing ways of defining the critical project. The goal of criticism, he says, should not be canon-making or politicking, but rather a properly elaborated science of the whole body of literature:

Criticism, rather, is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak. And just as there is nothing which the philosopher cannot consider philosophically, and nothing which the historian cannot consider historically, so the critic should be able to construct and dwell in a conceptual universe of his own.

This may sound like an arid scientistic or New Critical project, severing literature from life, but, as the end of the book makes clear, it is just the opposite: since criticism addresses itself primarily to rhetoric, and since no concept or emotion can be expressed without rhetoric, criticism in fact addresses itself to everything human. In this, and in his refusal to adjudicate questions of literary quality (which he dismisses as mere “taste,” hence social prejudice), Frye’s seemingly old-fashioned book leads more or less directly to some variant (a non-Marxist one) of cultural studies and multiculturalism.

But if Anatomy of Criticism is known for anything these days, it as a compendium of quasi-Jungian mythical or archetypal theories of literature. Frye argues that the four central types of criticism—the historical, the ethical, the archetypal, and the generic—examine different aspects of literature that can nevertheless be reconstructed by the theorist as a unity. This unity is ultimately based upon categorial human mythoi that refer to the life-cycles of individuals, societies, and the human race. Just as Shelley claimed that every language is “the chaos of a cyclic poem,” so Frye argues that literature in its diversity is made up of primordial images and narratives. For criticism to be a science, Frye believes, it must have an ultimate end in sight, and the ultimate end is literature-in-its-totality’s vision of the human archetypes on their progress through the natural rotation:

The structural principles of literature…are to be derived from archetypal and anagogic criticism, the only kind that assumes a larger context, of literature as a whole. […] Hence the structural principles of literature are as closely related to mythology and comparative religion as those of painting are to geometry. In this essay [on myths] we shall be using the symbolism of the Bible, and to a lesser extent Classical mythology, as a grammar of literary archetypes.

These mythoi, to each of which Frye assigns a season, move in a pattern from birth to death to rebirth and they are narrated in their entirety in The Bible, which Frye construes as a total myth. My brief review, even with selective quotation, cannot really reproduce the psychedelic quality of Frye’s pages on these topics, and I would have to read the book again to be able to account precisely for how the mythoi interrelate across modes and genres. As Frye traces how myth and mode interact, how each literary work and genre can be seen as one element in a total process, his book gives the pleasure of a narrative in which a maddening and chaotic mystery suddenly becomes clear:

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.

Most people today probably doubt that criticism can be a science in the way that Frye defines it, even though Frye was probably correct to think that literature would not be able to maintain its status in the modern university unless it could defend itself as a disinterested and autonomous contribution to Wissenschaft. But creative writers are happy to present themselves either as crazy people or craftspeople, and literary scholars have been cheerfully selling their birthright for every mess of pottage that has come their way, from structural linguistics to critical sociology to techno-utopianism. Having sawn off the branch they were sitting on (to vary my metaphor), literary scholars have little cause to complain, it seems to me, if they find themselves without support. Why pay a literary critic to do imprecise sociology, imprecise linguistics, imprecise political science, imprecise history, and the rest? Even at that, though, Frye’s Jung- and Frazer-inspired “science” will strike even sympathetic readers as too New Agey to be a sober and scholarly account of a body of historical evidence, however entertaining certain sensibilities (I mean mine!) happen to find it, and however inspiring it is as an attempt to make good on Wilde’s program for criticism: to show “the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms.”⁵

Frye does envision an ultimate “ethical” or social mission for literature, as he reveals in Anatomy‘s extraordinary “Tentative Conclusion.” There he defines the study of literature as a humanizing force that provides students with a repertoire of images for the just society that humanity will probably never attain but must always strive for. Readers of Fredric Jameson will recall the ease with which Jameson—playing Hegel to Frye’s Kant, as it were—was able to set Frye’s static archetypes into motion to appropriate his theory for Marxism. But Frye takes a hard line against Marxism, correctly observing that revolution and politics, by denying the autonomy that legitimates literature’s utopianism and by interfering with the freedom of writers and scholars to pursue their visions, actually curtails human development in the guise of pushing it forward. Frye, to be sure, is something of an optimist, and his ultimate view of our species’s progress seems to be something on the order of “Don’t push the river—it flows.” This will anger conservatives for its somewhat cavalier attitude toward tradition and it will anger radicals for its passivity; in short, Frye has constructed one of the most ingenious defenses of liberalism known to me:

The body of work done in society, or civilization, both maintains and undermines the class structure of that society. The social energy which maintains the class structure produces perverted culture in its three chief forms: mere upper-class culture, or ostentation, mere middle-class culture, or vulgarity, and mere lower-class culture, or squalor. These three classes are called by Matthew Arnold respectively, in so far as they are classes, the barbarians, the philistines, and the populace. Revolutionary action, of whatever kind, leads to the dictatorship of one class, and the record of history seems clear that there is no quicker way of destroying the benefits of culture. If we attach our vision of culture to the conception of ruler-morality, we get the culture of barbarians; if we attach it to the conception of a proletariat, we get the culture of the populace; if we attach it to any kind of bourgeois Utopia, we get the culture of philistinism.

Whatever one thinks of dialectic materialism as a philosophy, it is certainly true that when men behave or pretend to behave like material bodies, they do behave dialectically. If England goes to war with France, all the weaknesses in the English case and all the virtues of the French case are ignored in England; not only is the traitor the lowest of criminals, but it is indignantly denied that any traitor can be honestly motivated. In war, the physical or idolatrous substitute for the real dialectic of the spirit, one lives by half-truths. The same principle applies to the verbal or mimic wars made out of “points of view,” which are usually the ghosts of some kind of social conflict.

It seems better to try to get clear of all such conflicts, attaching ourselves to Arnold’s other axiom that “culture seeks to do away with classes.” The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is the reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination. The imaginative element in works of art, again, lifts them clear of the bondage of history. Anything that emerges from the total experience of criticism to form part of a liberal education becomes, by virtue of that fact, part of the emancipated and humane community of culture, whatever its original reference. Thus, liberal education liberates the works of culture themselves as well as the mind they educate. The corruption out of which human art has been constructed will always remain in the art, but the imaginative quality of the art preserves it in its corruption, like the corpse of a saint. No discussion of beauty can confine itself to the formal relations of the isolated work of art; it must consider, too, the participation of the work of art in the vision of the goal of social effort, the idea of a complete and classless civilization. This idea of a complete civilization is also the implicit moral standard to which ethical criticism always refers, something very different from any system of morals.

The idea of the free society implied in culture can never be formulated, much less established as a society. Culture is a present social ideal which we educate and free ourselves by trying to attain, and never do attain. It teaches, with the endless patience of the book which always presents the same words whenever we open it, but it is not possessed, for the experiences and meanings attached to the words are always new. No society can plan for its own culture unless it restricts the output of culture to socially predictable standards.

Why read this book today if you aren’t convinced of its politics or its theoretical presuppositions? Joshua Rothman gives the best reason: Frye’s lucid exposition of literary genres and modes expands our vocabulary for talking about novels, poems, plays, films, and other imaginative forms. When Frye protests against labelling any work of prose narrative a “novel,” insisting on the contrary that there are in fact four genres of prose narrative—romance, novel, confession, anatomy—you can feel the literary universe get a bit bigger. In that sense, this might be the most affirmative book of literary criticism or theory I have ever read. Frye ultimately implies that knowledge and pleasure should be concomitant in the attention we pay to the arts. The more we understand about a work’s tradition, the more we will be able to value it for what it is rather than censuring it for what it is not: as Frye says, we should not judge a romance by the standards of the novel and vice versa.

(Though some might understand what I mean if I say I am bit disappointed that Rothman has to use this theory to explicate the middlebrow genre-inflected literary fiction of today, whereas Frye’s own essay on genre climaxes in an attempt to explain the avant-garde achievements of Joyce: Frye praises Ulysses as a “complete prose epic” that contains all four prose genres in perfect balance, and he claims that Finnegans Wake goes further even than that to attain something like scriptural status.)

While some may think that Frye’s compendium of jargon and his intense schematism might neutralize literary appreciation by taking the passion out of it, it instead increases appreciation by imparting more and more language with which to express one’s knowledge about what one reads. I do believe, however, that it would be a disaster to try to create a great work by conforming to Frye’s categories: that would probably result in Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, and other such simplistic stuff that piles up clichés and calls them myths. Even if we accept Frye’s postulate that a critic must be a scientist, we can agree that it is the scientist’s business to account for nature, and not nature’s business to tailor and circumscribe itself for the benefit of the scientist.

In any case, I doubt this will be my only reading of this learned and mind-expanding book. I would advise every student of literature, professional or amateur, to read it sooner rather than later.

1. Frye, who described his own work as “Romantic,” pairs well with our current Romantic revival as described, for instance, by Ross Barkan in the Guardian as well as in these very electronic pages. On the other hand, though Frye seemed to follow Blake in essentially believing in what we’d now call “manifestation,” he also scorned the occult—he was a Christian clergyman—and even has a passage in Fearful Symmetry, too long and mired in Blake-specific terminology to quote here, explaining why “debased astrology” is both a bad thing and a female phenomenon. Suffice it to say that he contrasts astrological “influence,” one more damnable alienation of our own godly power to the stars and to mother nature, with divine “inspiration,” which lets us breathe the God in us. (Obviously, I disavow, speaking as both a Libra-rising peacekeeper and an Aquarius-sun visionary.) Anyway, I wonder if we might understand Frye’s Protestant liberalism à la Milton and Blake as a kind of “American” outcry for liberty from Tory Canada. I’d have to read his book on Canadian culture to know for sure, but from the summary it sounds possible, though it also sounds like his nostalgia for the green world of Shakespearean comedy and romance comes from his sense of Canada as literally hostile ground, too hostile for the love of liberty to take root.

2. “[W]ar to Blake is an outgrowth of the sacrificial impulse,” Frye writes, and explains how Blake saw Druidic human sacrifice, with its later culmination-redemption in Christ’s crucifixion, as the basis of our human fallenness from the unity that was God. This is quite close to Girard’s theory of the scapegoat and of the crucifixion as a climactically debunking enactment of all such sacrificial logic. Girard himself allowed that the Frye of Anatomy came close to his own theory while censuring Frye for avoiding the “radical analysis” that would fully expose the mechanism of scapegoating. Frye and McLuhan knew each other well, of course. They began as congenial colleagues but ended up judging each other’s later cultural eminence harshly, as B. W. Powe summarizes in the introduction to his 2014 comparative study of the two Canadian generalists:

I posit that this clash [between Frye and McLuhan] is the central Canadian visionary dynamism. McLuhan opposed literary specialization—in fact, any fragmenting specialization whatsoever. “The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy,” he announced in The Book of Probes (2003). Frye dismissed media studies. “Global village my ass,” he wrote in his Notebooks. To McLuhan, Frye had become a solitary heretic whose grandiose theoretical archetypes were frozen in unusable pictorial stasis. Frye was the prototypical bookworm, unaware of the effects of the technological shifts in the world, periodically and predictably censorious about the electronic revolution. To Frye, McLuhan had become the media guru, the apostle of electric junk, avatar of corporate interests, betrayer of the printed word, a sacrificial figure to the combustions of celebrity.

3. On the other hand, Frye is a Protestant, as against Girard and McLuhan’s Catholicism. (McLuhan was a convert, however, and was raised, like Frye, as a Methodist, which I learn from Powe’s study as cited in footnote 2 above.) I am not a sectarian, nor a practicing Catholic at all, so this is not a problem in itself. Frye, however, shares Blake’s mistrust of Catholicism as little better than a crypto-pagan goddess cult, an expression of the “female will,” a belle dame sans merci that traps the soul down here in the prison of the flesh. But you know that I side with another fashionable generalist of the early 2020s, Camille Paglia, in finding Catholicism promising precisely because it is a crypto-pagan goddess cult and thus has an emotional amplitude—passionate, aesthetic, erotic—lacking in the sometimes arid and airless extremes of Protestantism, as one finds it in Milton, Blake, or Frye. Those extremes of Protestantism, however, offer us the benefit of an absolute individualism, which collectivist-bureaucratic Catholicism too often lacks. We need both visions—and all the other visions, too, most proximally the Jewish visions. “All Religions Are One.” On that note, I repost here a screenshot I once commented upon on Tumblr from the controversial X/Twitter personality Logo Daedalus at once celebrating and lambasting Frye, Paglia, and Harold Bloom as a distinct critical cohort:

This is very much in Frye’s spirit. Of the three options, “Tragic Optimism” seems closest to my own attitude, or, as another Italian put it, an Italian otherwise quite distant from my and Paglia’s sensibility: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. It’s also unfair to deny Paglia a proper poetic descriptor just because she’s basically a centrist Democrat and was a bit credulous about 1980s pop culture. (Bracketing the contemporary culture war, Madonna was good in the 1980s anyway. I direct you to the chapter titled “Oh Father” in my novel The Class of 2000—the chapter containing the much-disguised autobiographical germ of the entire narrative.) If Frye is “Blakean” and Bloom is “Whitmanian,” then Paglia deserves the honorific “Spenserian.” And while Frye had the most capacious intellect of the three, Paglia almost certainly had the finest prose style, Bloom being more a personality than a writer sensu stricto; that she’s the weakest of the three is not obvious to me, though I would not wish to rank them. In his introduction to the 2000 edition of Anatomy, Bloom recalls that he once compared Frye to the neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus, much to Frye’s chagrin. I barely know who Iamblichus is, but I note that a definitive edition of one of his works was edited in 1888 by my distant ancestral non-ancestor, the fascist priest and philologist Ermenegildo Pistelli. It sounds as if Iamblichus’s conflict with his intellectual master Plotinus anticipates that of Bloom and Paglia with their precursor Frye:

Unlike Plotinus, who broke from platonic tradition by positing a separate soul, Iamblichus re-affirmed the soul's embodiment in matter and believed that matter was as divine as the rest of the cosmos.

What’s interesting about the Frye/Bloom relation is that it’s the Freud/Jung relation in reverse. In this dyad, the elder and mentor is the serene Protestant magus, while the rebellious ephebe is the agonistic Jewish disenchanter.

4. That gracious passage comes from the end of Fearful Symmetry. Here is a shorter and more ambitious credo from the beginning, this couched as an explanation of Blake’s views, and the type of sentiment we should be finding the courage to stand by today:

The religious, philosophical and scientific presentations of reality are branches of art, and should be judged by their relationship to the principles and methods of the creative imagination of the artist. If they are consistent with the latter, they fulfill a necessary function in culture: if they are not, they are pernicious mental diseases.

5. I don’t actually find this the most compelling objection to Frye, however, even though it was the one I chose to stress in 2015. The best objection, made by any number of his critics, including Bloom, is that his system-building, with its intense drive to find continuities, scants the individuality and irreducibility of any given great work of literature. In a collection of reviews of one of his later books, I find two critics eloquently articulating this complaint. First, Denis Donoghue:

Hence Mr. Frye is happy when he has located the category to which his poem belongs; while I am still pestered by the differences between poems in the same category. […] But my real quarrel with Mr. Frye is that even when he has dealt with the myth, structure, genre, and convention, or when he has shown the concert of leading symbols, I still find that he has left me somewhat short of the poetry. Structure is fine, but what about texture? I have often wondered why Mr. Frye so rarely finds it necessary to quote a passage of verse; but the reason is clear: you need to unroll the stuff only if you want to give the reader the feeling of it. And although Mr. Frye occasionally refers to the word-magic of poetry, he rarely discloses magical effects.

Second, R. S. Fraser:

Professor Frye is a copious, lucid, at once packed and graceful writer, and I have thought it better to tackle, head on, the extremely important controversial point, the point, one might put it, about the primacy of myth, rather than attempt to summarize, one after the other, the sixteen excellent essays in the theory and practice of criticism which this book contains. My case against him, in the Hamlet instance, is that drama is an advance on myth, a human and artistic advance, though a certain mythical element (like the element of alcohol in wine, maybe) is perhaps part of the indispensable strength of great drama. My case on the novel and on certain kinds of great modern poems, like Wordsworth’s Prelude, would be that they represent a human (if not certainly an artistic) advance even on drama, and that the mythical element may be very slight. Jane Austen’s novels, for instance, seem to me to be about moral self-education through making useful mistakes; is there a counterpart for this in ancient or contemporary primitive myths? Wordsworth is writing about the growth of a poet’s mind, partly of course through exposure to great myths embodied in poetry, but more importantly through exposure to such very dry and unprimitive stuff as eighteenth-century theories about how emotions and perceptions get permanently merged with each other. When Professor Frye goes in for practical criticism, he seems to me excellent on a poet like Spenser, who might, indeed, have been writing to his prescriptions; much less good on a poet like Yeats, who talked a great deal about mythology but whose permanent interest lies in the force of his personal reaction to a very concrete and actual world around him

These are serious objections, especially the latter, with its persuasive ethical argument that literature in its very specificity is a humane advance upon mythic generalization. After we meme Frye into late-2020s guru status, we will then undoubtedly have to meme Viktor Shklovsky or some other formalist into early 2030s guru status as a corrective—or, indeed, as Fraser suggests at the end of his review, good old Erich Auerbach.