We’ve gotten increasingly critical here at Super Fanicom, which I think is no problem at all. Though I do want to do an actual, you know, anime post pretty soon, to help cleanse the pallet a bit. I’m afraid I can’t do that yet, though, and am even proposing starting a series of posts on theory. In defense of this little project of mine, I think these will be relatively short. Here’s the skinny: I’m finally getting around to reading the whole of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. I’ve read parts before now, but never the whole thing, or in anything approaching linear order. I thought as I read I would post along with thoughts for each section. This is the “Polemical Introduction,” pt. 1.
Let’s start this shindig. Frye begins by arguing criticism is not a form of parasitic work. He mentions the history of the idea, saying it had its heyday in the nineteenth century, but it’s still sort-of around. Given that’s still how most people view it now, I think Frye might have been understating things. He sums the idea up like this: ”art based on pre-existing art” (3).
Here’s one I dislike pretty hard:
The attempt to reach the public directly through “popular” art assumes that criticism is artificial and public tastes natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative “folk.” (4)
This sounds an awful lot like he’s dismissing pop. lit., and he does go on, further along, to basically dismiss popular criticism. Aside from apparently conflating reviewers and popular critics, he says the pop. critic just uses critical language to push his or her personal taste. I don’t think that must necessarily be true (outside of how I think it’s probably true of all forms of criticism — it would be no more true for pop. critics). For what I would consider an example of pop. critics, uh, look right here. Super Fanicom. Duh.
I think he fucks this next part up. He claims the critic is the “pioneer” of education, making it sound like the critic bears the weight of deciding what our culture will hold up as “good” forever more. ”Whatever popularity Shakespeare and Keats have now is equally the result of the publicity of criticism. A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory” (4). Uh… So, how is that not dependent on popular opinion? It’s long been a widely- (but not universally-) held belief that Shakespeare’s fame as the great playwright is due to happenstance, but usually no one gets any juice out of claiming it was the critics who did that. I generally hear it was because people kept putting on his plays until everyone knew them.
Here’s a really weird one. ”There is another reason why criticism has to exist. Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb” (4). Now, I agree that “arts are dumb.” That is, they can’t speak, they simply are. However, this claim implies criticism isn’t art — if it were, it couldn’t talk either. And I’m going with that idea, not Frye’s, here. Criticism simply is as well, and the reader interprets it just like a novel or a tv show. Why else would literary criticism have a veritable cottage industry of writing about criticism, trying to figure out what Derridian criticism is, really, or why the New Critics mattered so much and don’t any longer?
Just a great line, supporting the last point: ”The artist, as John Stuart Mill saw in a wonderful flash of critical insight, is not heard but overheard” (5).
Same page, Frye mentions that a writer who writes about his or her own writing is simply another critic at that point, and no better off than anyone else when interpreting. Which I have said already.
Frye does say an artist can’t actually be a good critic by the way (6). My marginal note is, verbatim: ”the artist cannot be critic? Bullshit, say I.”
He suggests criticism be organized scientifically; that is, he wants it to be systematic. Hilariously, he says it’s not a “pure” science, but “these phrases belong to a nineteenth century cosmology which is no longer with us” (7). Had Frye never met a physicist talking about psychology? I mean, I know physicists think they know fucking everything that’s important in the world, but they’re not the only ones still obsessed with “pure” science.
He sets up a good comparison that involves physics, though. He points out that the study of physics has, as its object, not physics but nature. That is, physics describe nature. In the same way, one can’t study literature; one studies criticism, which has, as its object, literature (11).
Frye claims it’s not enough to simply steal, wholesale, theoretical structures from other disciplines and apply them to criticism. ”Hence the prominence of the Archimedes fallacy mentioned above: the notion that if we plant our feet solidly enough in Christian or democratic or Marxist values we shall be able to lift the whole of criticism at once with a dialectic crowbar” (12). I guess I’m as “guilty” of this as anyone else — Campbell’s myth-criticism comes through Freud and Jung before arriving at literature. I’m not how sure I am it’s “guilt” I’m suffering from though, hence the rather arch quotation marks. I do agree, though, that trying to lever the whole study up on the external fulcrum isn’t the way to go.
There are a few things I marked because they apply so well to this proposed project we Super Fanicom people have now, of an anime taxonomy. I almost imagine them as randomized quotations at the top of the pages, like we have now with the anime and game lines. Here they are.
It is all very well for Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize. . .
We discover that the critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. . .
Thanks to the Greeks, we can distinguish tragedy from comedy in drama, and so we still tend to assume that each is the half of drama that is not the other half. When we come to deal with such forms as the masque, opera, movie, ballet, puppet-play, mystery-play, morality, commedia dell’arte, and Zauberspiel, we find ourselves in the position of the Renaissance doctors who refused to treat syphilis because Galen said nothing about it. (13)
And that’s all for now. I was clearly full of shit when I said I thought these would be short, because I’m only one-third of the way through the “Polemical Introduction.” Maybe I’ll get better at cutting down what I reference in the posts. Oh well.
All references, unless otherwise noted, taken from Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1990.
No offense, but that Frye dude sounds awful. Criticism is only an art in the way eating caramel popcorn without getting your hands dirty can be called an art (i.e. as a technique). If the arts are dumb, meaning they do not communicate anything to us, then what are we basing our criticism on? The last quote on the Greeks sounds like something fancy you come up with at a party to look all smart and stuff.
So in essence I sympathize with your thoughts on the book so far, but I do not at all sympathize with your (heroic) effort to go through with reading the rest of it :)
Actually, Frye is one of the more brilliant critics I’ve read. He was writing in a time when criticism focused down on parts so small, the critics effectively lost sight of the work as a whole, and he attempted to change that. Despite being unpopular among critics today — he has the misfortune of not writing in the past twenty years, as he’s dead — his readings of Shakespeare are still considered among the best for dealing with the entire play and Shakespeare’s oevre (and that last quotation from the Greeks relates to his effort to get people to look at the entire work and, in extension, entire bodies of works, rather than just the parts they’re comfortable with).
If criticism isn’t art, what is it? It’s created to be read by an audience, to entertain them (given that “enlightenment” is a form of entertainment, as not everyone enjoys it and it can’t be classified as anything else without the tricky problem of thought-control cropping up). That’s what art is, something created to entertain.
If the arts communicated with us, there would be no need for criticism. We’re basing criticism entirely on the problem of the art in question being unable to communicate with the audience. It’s easier to think of a painting: it doesn’t say anything to the viewer, it simply is, and it’s up to the viewer to interpret it. It can feel counter-intuitive, because other forms of art use language, but they’re in the same situation.
I instinctively feel (otherwise I’m just speculating) that all works are reactions to language. A poem can be read as a reading of nature. But even so, to articulate the sentiment, the meaning, the poet writes a poem as a reading of language. This is why some words are chosen over others,
“Are all the lights in the sky our enemies?” (not from a poem, but a poetic line I’m quite fond of)
In any case, a Gurren Lagann metaphoric arrangement for ‘lights in the sky’ is different from older poems because I think that the very act of tying to say it differently, in pursuit of originality or merely escaping banality/plagiarism, or even attempting to render homage, is a reading, is criticism.
Is a reading of a reading less than art then?
Allusion, allegory, these devices are possible only through the reading of written material. Very few exceptions (and even these few I can only speculate on).
@ animekritik
The arts are dumb, and perhaps even signs are dumb (accepting intentional fallacy) because meaning is entirely in the hands of a reader, the consumer of the sign.
The consumption of a sign is an active pursuit. We ‘assign’ the signified to the signifier based on what’s available in our memory. If it agrees with our reasoning/ideology, we accept it. Often we re-send the sign(al) into the world, and when we find agreement from others (as to what it means), then the interpretation of the sign gains “power”.
I keep using this example because it is powerful: Code Geass (R2) = TRAINWRECK
To go back on topic, I feel that we are always ‘writing from’ somewhere and ‘about’ something – and this is criticism enough for me. Frye must be referring only to specific reviews, academic writing, etc. It is limiting, his definition IMO.
Well, I wouldn’t have explained the “arts are dumb” comment again above if I’d read this first; you did it better than I.
I also agree, basically, with your idea that poems are reactions. I’m not sure if it’s always language. It could be, I’m genuinely not sure. Definitely I generally think writing is a reaction to writing, but I think there might be room in there for it to also be a reaction to other things. But filtered into a reaction to writing. :) So really I’m just agreeing, there, but stipulating how.
And yes, on arranging as interpretation. Cleanth Brooks called it the “heresy of paraphrase,” that a work of art is incapable of being paraphrased. If the art were meant to be in any other form, it would have been. The only way to communicate the stuff of the art (whatever it is) is to quote it.
I think maybe I ought to do the rest of the introduction in one, shorter post, as it’s literally him standing up and challenging the field. Raises hackles without arguing much (though it’s fun how much Frye gets in despite the nature of the topic). The essays themselves have much more meat that applies directly to criticism, rather than being about criticism. At any rate, there would be less chance of me maligning him through the heresy of paraphrase. ^_^
“Meaning is in the hands of the reader” is a true statement. When something is in your hands it means you can manipulate it and control it, but it still “is” something with an origin independent of your person. Or if you want to go all einstein/saussure and stuff you can say that the meaning is dependent on both the object of art and the enjoyer of art (i.e. meaning is in the meeting of subject-object or their conjunction), but even then still there is an irreducible object there independent of you the observer/reader. A picasso is a picasso, and depending on the observer it can be many things besides that, but it’s still a picasso. A picasso can be in the hands of the observer in the museum, but that doesn’t mean the observer produced the picasso.
‘The arts are dumb” sounds striking and nice (everything with a paradoxical flair does, initially) but it just doesn’t hold in my opinion. Arts do talk to us, and we respond. Criticism is meant to elucidate, place in context, etc, not to entertain! And criticism is not art. Because criticism is utilitarian at heart, and art isn’t.
That’s just how I see it though.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this assumes that any criticism can be absolutely, objectively “correct.” I don’t believe this to be the case. That is, I’m wont to say that all criticism — actually, all readings of a text are “right,” but that’s predicated upon them being right for the individual readers who put them forward. Criticism can elucidate, and it can certainly give me insight into the reading experience of others, but if an element experienced precisely as by another isn’t there for me, it isn’t there for me, and, in all likelihood, no amount of criticism is going to put it there. It ultimately doesn’t teach me anything about the art it discusses — it can teach me about criticism, to be certain, about the act of reading, but if I see something in a text, it’s because my mind, knowing what it knows, put it there, not because it’s there objectively.
Besides, what does it matter to my reading and use of criticism what criticism is “meant” to do?
What the object brings to the table is a kind of shell, inside which there is infinite space, or at least immeasurable space, that the enjoyer fills with meaning. Or at least that’s how I think of it.
That’s pretty good. Maybe we should all come up with our own obscure metaphors for the object of art.
Joking aside, I think of it a bit like a platter. It shows up empty and the audience piles up different things on it, but only what the platter can support. Of course, I just made that up right now, so it’s not nearly as rigorously accurate or sci-fi cool as yours.
Yeah, this is all down to personal opinion. :D I wouldn’t have been as pissy-sounding (at least, it seems now like my reply to you earlier sounded pissy) if I hadn’t responded right when I woke up.
The main difference between us, I think, is that elucidation, placing in context, &c., are all just forms of entertainment to me. I’m relatively proud that I came up with this idea (which has become pretty important to me) on my own, but it’s not new. Michael Chabon espouses it in the first essay of his non-fiction collection, Maps & Legends. Not that that should win you over, plenty of other people will say exactly what you are. And so long as you make entertaining criticism, I don’t really care. ^_^
Honestly, I’m just glad anyone commented at all. Imagine the horror of most of the people on Anine Nano finding this on their lists this morning.
Language, in my use is a system of symbols, of representation. Mathematics is such. A rose is not ‘red’ until someone names it so, and gets someone else to agree in the representation (of red, which is ‘not blue’). It becomes so, it ‘lives’ within this society of two, until the society grows.
With regards to the heresy of paraphrase, how about this: removing value judgments, can the paraphrase be appreciated as art?
But of course it can, as Mozart’s variations on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” convinces me. Trust me on this, I am taking criticism into “artful” directions here on Superfani. Pontifus is aware of my project, and I’m a week behind in the writing of it.
The adaptation of the Ghost in the Shell animes are paraphrases of the manga, are they not? Heretical is an arbitrary description I believe.
Brooks was specifically talking about criticism; I’m sure he wouldn’t argue about adaptations. He studied poetry, and adaptation’s big there.
And he wouldn’t argue, probably, with what you’re talking about in terms of criticism as well. What he wanted to avoid was people saying “this poem is about this,” and that’s the end of the discussion. It’s not really about anything — it’s like saying a person is about something. You can talk about art all you want — certainly Brooks did. : )
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