The Relevance of Northrop Frye's "Specific Continuous Forms"

The Relevance of Northrop Frye's "Specific Continuous Forms" David Leon Higdon Texas Tech University Thirty-two years after its initial publication and its enthusiastic reception , Northrop Frye's Anatomy ofCriticism has little ofthe power it once commanded in critical circles. Its almost cosmic designs, even when developed and extended by such later works as Fables ofIdentity (1963), The Secular Scripture (1976), and The Great Code (1982), stand relatively unused, swept aside by the later paradigms and vocabularies ofsemiotics , structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. William Righter may well be correct in his assessment that Anatomy of Criticism "may pose a self-destructive standard, and be seen as one of the curiosities of what 'the age demanded,' a remarkable if eccentric episode in literary history" (342). One essay, though, continues to be discussed by narratologists with some frequency, but often in the form of attacks. This is to be regretted, because "Specific Continuous Forms (Prose Fiction)," in many ways the centerpiece of Frye's "Theory of Genre" chapter, has been seriously misrepresented to narratologists by such theorists as Paul Hernadi, Tzvetan Todorov, and Robert Scholes, both because they failed to visualize accurately the three-dimensional geometry of Frye's paradigm and because they failed to perceive the breadth ofFrye's system of coordinates.1 Philip Stevick once called the essay "the single most significant and influential event in the criticism of prose fiction in the last twenty years" (153), and even in disuse it still merits much of this praise, if for no other reason than its focused assault on the concept ofthe novel-centered vision offiction which paved the way for much later narratological theory. In Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification, Paul Hernadi approaches Frye's work through an impressive discussion of four kinds of concepts (expressive, pragmatic, structural, and mimetic) and of sixty-seven critic/theorists, in an attempt "to fill that curious gap in the literary self-awareness of our time" (vii). Hernadi finds Anatomy of Criticism "a most ambitious theory of genre" (131), enjoying a "breadth and depth ofinsights" (131) and filled with "impressively largescale speculations concerning plot structure" (132) which often "articulate the difference between the two basic types ofliterature [mythos and 223 224Rocky Mountain Review dianoia] in a most suggestive manner" (140); however, he has no difficulty in identifying inconsistencies in terminology, slipperiness, and ambiguity of certain key terms, and outright contradictions both with the Anatomy of Criticism and without in its relationship to other of Frye's works. Ironically, though, Hernadi seems quite reluctant to address the crucial fourth chapter, "Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres." Instead, he summarizes the third essay (quite accurately and perceptively), explores the implications of Frye's theory of myths, and treats Frye's first essay on the "displacement" of myths as a preface to discussing the fourth essay. When the discussion does emerge, it addresses general problems, specifically in terms of the relationship between "epos" and "fiction" (142), but consideration of specific aspects is almost immediately dropped for a consideration of how Frye's ideas have been handled by Robert Scholes and Carl H. Klaus in a series of "lucid textbooks" (145). Though published in Paris in 1970, Tzvetan Todorov's Introduction à la littérature fantastique reached the general English-speaking audience in 1973 as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, most ably translated by Richard Howard. From its title, one would not expect it to contain a discussion of Frye's general theory of genres, but its first chapter, "Literary Genres," contains precisely that— a discussion, framed first as a "contemporary theory of genres" used to "get a better sense of what positive principles must guide our work, what dangers are to be avoided" (8), which then moves quickly into a pointed critique of certain aspects of Frye's essay. With masterful succinctness, Todorov summarizes the major theoretical assumptions ofAnatomy ofCriticism and outlines six classification categories developed in Frye's four essays, one of which appears only in "Specific Continuous Forms." With equal clarity, he asserts that Frye's classifications "are not logically coherent either among themselves or individually" (12), that "many possible combinations are missing from Frye's enumeration" (13), that Frye...