Northrop Frye Today
Also: The huts of the Appalachian Trail, “Image” hiring a new EIC, genetic memories, in praise of traditional farming, and more.
Last summer, I gave a talk on the state of criticism for the University of Saint Thomas’s “Summer Literary Series” in Houston. (This year’s series is happening now. The evening events are open to the public. While it’s too late (alas!) to hear A. M. Juster, Adam Kirsch, and Ryan Wilson, you can still catch Katy Carl, Ralph Hammann, David Yezzi, and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.)
Anyway, at last year’s event, I spoke with the novelist Randy Boyagoda after my talk, which I ended with the remark that the fate of criticism is tied to the fate of religion, or something to that effect, and that a revival in (real) criticism may only follow a religious revival. He suggested I take another look at the Canadian critic Northrop Frye.
I haven’t (yet), but Alan Jacobs does in this month’s Harper’s. Frye was one of the most popular critics of the 1950s and early 1960s. His magnum opus, Anatomy of Criticism, was published in 1957. In it, Frye provides an account of different “modes” of criticism, including what he calls the “mythic” mode, which focuses on literature’s universal appeal through symbols.
“Why did people respond to it?” Jacobs asks. “What was it about myth criticism, as exemplified by Frye and certain others, that made it so compelling throughout the third quarter of the twentieth century? What needs did it meet? What questions did it answer? Why did it disappear? And—I wonder—might we consider bringing it back, at least in some form?”
In the essay, Jacobs examines a precursor to Frye’s myth criticism in Giambattista Vico’s 1744 Principles of New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. “One of Vico’s chief claims,” Jacobs writes, “is that, though civilizations rise and fall, the periods of decline do not return them to their original state. Some foundation remains from which rebuilding can commence. A central challenge for a science of politics, then, is to reduce the severity of the inevitable downturns, shorten the reign of ‘barbarism,’ and through these means, hope for gradual improvement. Such hope he finds necessary for religious reasons if for no others: as he says in the book’s final sentence, ‘If one is not pious, one cannot in truth be wise.’”
According to Vico, the “severity of the inevitable downturns” can be reduced by the production literature that reminds us of “the wisdom of our ancestors”:
He describes the twelfth century as a barbaric era, but argues that, in France anyway, such barbarism was countered by Peter Lombard’s “most subtle” theology on the one hand and, on the other, the ongoing influence of the eighth-century bishop Turpin’s historical writings, which “abounded in . . . myths.” (Vico means that as a compliment.) Vico applauded these authors for drawing on their cultural inheritance. By contrast, philosophers of Vico’s own time—that is, Descartes and his successors—were indifferent to such things as myth, focusing instead on the analysis of abstract principles. Vico worried that introducing students to too rigidly conceptual modes of thinking constituted a “barbarism of the intellect,” warning that “a metaphysical art of criticism and algebra” could render them “too attenuated in their manner of thinking for the full scope of life.”
Vico believed that those who lacked a rationalist philosophical apparatus like Descartes’s did not necessarily lack philosophy, metaphysical insight, or wisdom. Their wisdom was just of a different order—what Vico calls “poetic wisdom” and sees embodied, supremely, in Homer. Such poetic wisdom is the product of vast cultural movements, rather than of individual genius; Vico believed that Homer was not a historical person but simply the name given to the collective poetic wisdom of the Greek people. He intimated that lasting progress could be made only through a scienza nuova that unites modern thought with a historical understanding of the role of poetry and myth in shaping culture. Myths, for Vico, were not merely false stories that could be safely ignored by the rational, but rather exercises in metaphysical ingenuity, capable of preserving and transmitting vital wisdom.
Jacobs traces Vico’s ideas from the Romantic period through the first half of the twentieth century. Myth was used by both literary and political figures (Jacobs notes Hitler’s use of a national “Volk” myth in Germany) to counter the divisions created by a purely rationalist approach to the world. Yet, its use in Germany, for example, was divisive, to say the least:
Adolf Hitler emerges as a force in German politics and society at almost the same moment that The Waste Land and Ulysses appear, and what we see in Hitler, and indeed the entire Nazi program, is a different sort of “mythical method.” Whereas Justus Möser had insisted on the validity of local cultural styles and practices, refusing to make universal judgments, Nazism makes the Volk national, not local, and declares that one particular Volk is genetically superior to others—a superiority made manifest in its mythological inheritance—and thus must rule over them.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, there arose among Western democracies a fear of all narratives that divide and exclude—of what today we call identity politics, even if the relevant identities were different than those that now occupy us. Western artists and intellectuals, sensing the dangers of a mythical method that relies on qualitative distinctions between one culture and another, felt the need for a reinforced humanism, a stress-tested account of what links and binds all human beings. Indeed, there had been some question of whether the war against the Nazis could be won without such a humanism, of which the 1943 pamphlet The Races of Mankind, by Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, was representative
It is in this context that Frye’s appeal to myth should be understood, Jacobs argues, as using myth to build a sort of pan-national unity. Yet, it too, came under attack from critics like Roland Barthes, who argued that the “ambiguous” new humanism—with its appeal to a universal human nature—was little more than a convenient “alibi” for those in power to shape the world as they see fit. Frye subsequently fell out of fashion. Here’s Jacobs:
Should we regret the passing of the mythical method, of mythology in its etymological sense of discourse about myths and mythmaking? Perhaps the question is misleading: mythmaking is alive and well—if by that we mean the creation and sharing of stories that are meant to orient us, morally and emotionally, to our world and are resistant to restatement in straightforward conceptual terms. But taken differently, the question reveals just how the decline of myth criticism has tended to render our own myths invisible to us as myths. They may appear to us, but they do so in false guises, as science perhaps, or as politics, or as administrative procedure.
Today, none of our regnant myths produces a sense of what Barthes contemptuously called “the human ‘community’ ”—they are not in the business of universality, of grounding and justifying humanism, of making a family of man. Such endeavors can seem—like Maya Angelou’s poem “Human Family”: “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike”—fit chiefly for greeting cards and Pinterest boards.
And yet. Though the study of myth emerged from the discovery of cultural diversity, the mythical method of the twentieth century arose from a desperate hope to bridge the chasms of hatred and fear that separate humans from one another. Fact and argument alone cannot build forbearance and charity across racial and cultural and sexual boundaries; this requires image and event, the visualizable and the narratable, picture and story. One can see that the attempt failed while admitting and even embracing its nobility.
Have we lost the knack or the appetite for such stories? For tales of wounds that do not heal, kings who sacrifice themselves for the good of the people, slaves who are really princes, peasants whose generosity is known to the gods—and gods who die and are born again? Perhaps. But it was not so long ago that some of our best writers were drawn to them. A knack lost may yet be regained.
Do read the whole thing.
In other news, you may remember that Image announced it was closing after 35 years of publication. It turns out that it will continue after all. It is looking for a new Editor-in-Chief. Here’s the job description. I think it’s great Image will continue, but it’s a little odd to hire an editor-in-chief for only 5 to 8 hours a week. It sounds like things are still very precarious.
Andrew Bernard reviews Michael Cook’s A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity: “Across 846 pages, Cook has written an obvious masterwork that covers all of the lands touched by the explosive emergence of Islam from the sixth-century Arabia of Muhammad’s birth to the turn of the 19th century. Not many histories touch equally on Andaman Island cannibals and the imperial palaces of the Ottomans. Necessarily a dense work, it is also delightful in its sheer scope and variety. This is especially true in a writer as witty as Cook, who sustains a breezy, Socratic style throughout, inviting the reader to consider with him the “good questions” of history, those without any clear-cut answer.”
Can life experiences be genetically transferred to one’s offspring? A handful of new studies suggest they can: “Scientists working in the emerging field of epigenetics have discovered the mechanism that allows lived experience and acquired knowledge to be passed on within one generation, by altering the shape of a particular gene. This means that an individual’s life experience doesn’t die with them but endures in genetic form. The impact of the starvation your Dutch grandmother suffered during the second world war, for example, or the trauma inflicted on your grandfather when he fled his home as a refugee, might go on to shape your parents’ brains, their behaviours and eventually yours.”
In praise of traditional farming: “Britain is one of the most nature-depleted places on Earth. The consequences for human wellbeing and resilience, as well as for non-human life, are grave. Conservationists and others say it doesn’t have to be this way. But when it comes to recovery, what should we aim for? How much can we know about what was once present? How much is it practicable or sensible to restore? What does recovery, let alone ‘rewilding’, really mean in a rapidly heating world? Sophie Yeo does not have the answers to all of these questions. Nobody does. What she does offer in Nature’s Ghosts are insights that could help shape a better informed and more constructive debate.”
A mysterious monolith is discovered near Las Vegas: “The structure was spotted by the Las Vegas Police Department, who said they saw it during a search and rescue mission north of the Las Vegas Valley. ‘We see a lot of weird things … but check this out!’ the police posted on social media. The monolith is similar to other similarly puzzling ones that appeared around the globe in 2020.”
A not-so-mysterious 26-foot sculpture of Marilyn Monroe is making some people upset in Palm Springs, California: “The statue reproduces the famous Seven Year Itch photo of the star holding down her dress as it’s blown by a gust of wind. If you see the statue from behind, though—for example, if you were to walk out the front doors of the art museum—you would see right up her windblown dress, her underpants-clad ass five times larger than life. You might find this particular detail loving or perverse, depending on your perspective. And everyone here does have a perspective on Forever Marilyn, as the sculpture is titled. Catherine and Michael Mahon retired to Palm Springs in 2009. ‘The statue does not belong where it is,’ Catherine said . . . ‘When the deal was made, there was supposed to be a view of the museum, and it blocks the museum.’ ‘It’s a huge kitsch piece,’ Michael pronounced. ‘Which is cool, and I get the appeal,’ Catherine said. ‘If it was just moved over 50 feet or so, I wouldn’t mind it at all.’”
Book sales boomed in April, Publishers Weekly reports: “Sales of adult books rose 25.1% in April. Digital audiobooks continued their strong performance in the month, with sales skyrocketing 57.3% over the comparable period a year ago. E-book sales also did well, with sales up 19.8%. The two big print formats, hardcover and trade paperback, had gains of 17.6% and 29.2%, respectively.”
Daniel Johnson praises Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History: “It is rare that one wants to ascribe beauty to a book by an academic, but this is no academic book (despite being a product of deep scholarship). It is the work of a true lover of his subject, an uomo universale who deserves to speak on behalf of a great cause that is constantly endangered but must never be lost: the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters.”
Sophie McBain reviews Johann Hari’s Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs: “Hari is good at turning out eminently readable popular science books on of-the-moment subjects – fracturing attention spans, depression, the war on drugs – and his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs, is no exception. He knows how to deploy a good anecdote and personalise big, political issues, and in Magic Pill he intersperses interviews with experts and scientists with an account of his own struggles with his weight and addiction to junk food.” But can he be trusted?
The huts of the Appalachian Trail: “For hikers on the Appalachian Trail, arriving at a shelter at the end of the day means a source of fresh water and a dry place to sleep—assuming the hut isn’t already full by the time they arrive. Particularly for through-hikers, the shelter also represents a gathering place for members of the trail community to socialize and exchange information. As architect and building science scholar D. Jason Miller writes, these shelters are the product of a number of construction techniques used in different places on different parts of the long trail. But they all fit into an architectural archetype known as the ‘primitive hut.’”
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Enjoyed reading about the critics and mythologists.