I will swiftly run out of images of girls reading, but for now...
Part one of my grand adventure was a little strange. After sleeping on it, I think it’s because I wussed out and posted before finishing the entire first section of the book. I left you, the reader, with a partial view, much as Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity through a police officer’s report on his act; he protested vigorously that, to be fairly tried, the judge and jury needed to see his act directly, but his appeals were denied. Frye, were he alive and Googling himself every few minutes, would likely protest in much the same way to my butchering of his “Polemical Introduction.” Here’s part two of the introduction, wherein I finish it, find more that’s useful, get the seeds (already) of an anime post based on same, and find Frye apologizing for much of what seems strange.
Frye calls for a theory of criticism analogous to biology’s theory of evolution. He claims that criticism had been too hodge-podge, dealing with works as discrete units rather than phenomenon that could be explained. He compares the critic with no central theory to pre-evolutionary biologists, whose work, though exhaustive, served only to catalogue animals and plants, rather than deal with the issue of how they came to be the way they are (16). I’ve often called myth- and genre-criticism an attempt to find the “universal field theory” of literature.
If the critic deals with details too fine, such as the cataloguing process above, the whole of literature will be too broad, much like (shifting analogies — my fault, not his, he uses several throughout) a mathematician writing out all the digits of a googleplex. ”Critic and mathematician alike will have somehow to invent a less cumbersome notation” (16). This is, I propose, the use of genres and archetypes — a “less cumbersome notation” with which to get at the central issues. A kind of literary shorthand, much like scientific notation.
Frye claims literature would yield an “inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries” even if new work stopped being written (17). What’s the line from Star Trek? Endless permutations on the same theme? Agreed, Northrop Frye, agreed.
Frye exhorts the reader not to confuse “taste,” that is, personal likes and dislikes, with criticism. Several forms of criticism serve, he claims, only to justify personal tastes, and he mocks this idea by choosing three writers “at random” (the authors are too cunning and pertinent to the discussion for me to believe that) and goes through all the permutations of saying one is better than the others, or worse. His three examples are Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley. One can argue each is better, or worse, for different reasons, but he illustrates that it’s simply personal opinion and not useful to anyone, not even the person making the claim (18-23).
One of my notes to this: the idea there (destruction of partisanship in criticism) seems to me, at first blush, to remove criticism further from the realm of art, as art is notoriously partisan. Since he wants to make it systematic, as objective as it’s possible for it to be, this is understandable. Not sure how much I agree with it, but it’s certainly interesting.
He does fall into Stanley Fish’s trap of reverting to relying on “cultivated readers” (19-20) to help shore up his assumption that quality will show even through objective lenses. I’m a populist, so no.
What’s great about a critic like Frye is that he’s really enormously funny if you have the right sense of humor, even as he’s being smart and enlightening. I just have to blockquote this, hold on…
When we examine the touchstone technique in Arnold, however, certain doubts arise about his motivation. The line from The Tempest, “In the dark backward and abysm of time,” would do very well as a touchstone line. One feels that the line “Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch” somehow would not do, though it is equally Shakespearean and equally essential to the same play.” (21).
I read this as a version of Brooks’s “heresy of paraphrase,” canted specifically toward critics. You can’t ignore one part of the play because of your social agenda, and Frye claims that Arnold had a heavy social agenda, apparently wanting to replace religion with poetics as the structuring force of social behavior in society.
Useful for me, as it helps debunk the modern frenzy for “political” readings of everything: ”there are critics who enjoy making religous, anti-religious, or political campaigns with toy soldiers labelled ‘Milton’ or ‘Shelley’ more than they enjoy studying poetry” (24).
A little more that can help explain, from earlier, why “art is dumb.” Criticism, Frye claims, can’t recapture the original aesthetic experience (my term, not his). It’s like the beauty of seeing color; biology can only explain how the human eyeball works — hardly the same experience at all (his comparison, not mine). To be actual experience, “the reading of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of literature” (27). If art could speak in the same way as criticism, everyone’s experience would be the same, because art would be like a solely logical argument. It works in one way, says what it means to, and that’s what everyone gets from it.
He ends by apologizing, basically. He says a sympathetic reader must ignore or see past “whatever strikes him as inadequate or simply wrong” (29). He tells the reader to cherry-pick what works for him or her. Much of it [the book], I expect, and in fact hope, may be mere scaffolding, to be knocked away when the building is in better shape” (29).
I think all my differences with the “Polemical Introduction” stem not from his theory or his methodology, but from his purpose. He appears to view criticism as a kind of guard, even though he lambastes the traditional ideas of critics as the guards of good taste. I view criticism merely as another form of entertainment, a different genre than poetry or fiction, but ultimately having the same goal at its core: to amuse the audience for a while.
How is the appreciation of criticism different from the appreciation of philosophy is puzzling. Philosophical works are treated as literature, and criticism is treated as a work a step removed from it.
Philosophy, is criticism, of something as nebulous as reality. Criticism is philosophy, in theory form, and applied to tangible cases – completed works of fiction, etc.
I majored in literature with a minor in philosophy. In the lit department, criticism was hypocritically treated as a necessary evil. The professors saw their works as ‘scholarship’ and ‘appreciation’. When I joined that faculty, I spent most of my time in the philosophy department (where they converted their conference room into a smoking lounge), and where the professors gleefully used literary examples to illustrate their philosophical points.
>>I view criticism merely as another form of entertainment, a different genre than poetry or fiction, but ultimately having the same goal at its core: to amuse the audience for a while.
And to the levels of how amusing can it get. That is an extent of my ambition.
Yeah – my ex was a philosophy major, and she considered me to be relatively well-read (considering I wasn’t a philosophy major), and almost all the things I knew about the field I had gotten from literary theory classes. And a little from my honors courses, but still. : )
[...] is up to the task, and I trust in your archive digging skills, but Cuchlann’s Adventures in Criticism proved to be quite interesting, in addition to Pontifus’s conversation on Critic vs [...]