Afterword: Of Greatness in Criticism

In a touching and, at the same time, a not un-amusing passage from the Notebooks, Northrop Frye consoles himself for not being a great epic poet, like Milton. Being merely a great critic – a reader of genius – will have to suffice. After all, as he said elsewhere, there aren’t really creative and uncreative activities. There are creative and uncreative people. Unless, of course, being creative isn’t after all the most important thing for a critic to do. Our culture puts a questionably high value on creativity as such, a word never used in our current sense (whatever that is, exactly) until the eighteenth century. Businessmen take seminars on creativity in order to think out of the box; educational theorists urge the cultivation of the natural creativity of children in primary schools, to avoid the tedium of fundamentals; and here at Harvard professors are urged to substitute creative projects for the hidebound, traditional essay (sometimes, I comply). But are we right to place the highest value on creativity and regard it as good in all instances? Is there perhaps something more important? Creativity is restless and productive, but it isn’t always beneficently so. It is true that without this restless productivity, the gloomy child of boredom and annoyance (as we see her in Durer’s Melancholia), nothing new would appear in the world. But creativity does bring forth many useless and worse than useless things – creative people design better landmines. Some of these things, even weapons, do have the power to fascinate as art. The Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, is one of the more important cinematic achievements of the twentieth century. Perhaps criticism needs to address that, not creatively, but as a question of moral judgement. Is there a power of judgement to help us know which creative discoveries are important, which we can afford to ignore, and which we have a duty to criticize in the strong, moral sense? Making such judgements is where the critic comes in, as criticism has traditionally been understood since the time of the Athenian stage, when the critics, the judges, awarded the prize – and occasionally levied a fine. Criticism was judging between the important and the unimportant, the best and the rest, the winners and the losers. That remains a major part of the critic’s task today: making the value judgements Frye so entertainingly ridicules in the ‘Polemical Introduction’ to Anatomy of Criticism. He has a point, for his target is the parochial constriction of the critic’s task to that of a fastidious arbiter of taste, with no stomach for the learning digested by the nineteenth-century masters from John Ruskin to George Saintsbury – or for the patience and openness needed for imaginative attention, qualities in which Frye excelled. Even so, there’s no escaping the presence of judgement at all levels of the critic’s task, including the most banal. Critics decide who gets attention – who gets published, who wins a prize, who gets a job. Much of it is work for the short term.

But the great critic does work for long term, and so must be patient, curious, open, outgoing, and catholic, to use Frye’s word, rightly fastened on by Jonathan Arac. In its etymological sense, catholic means impartially general, and this quality is perhaps more fully displayed in Frye’s Letters in Canada contributions to the University of Toronto Quarterly than in Anatomy of Criticism, for all its comprehensiveness. Inevitably, the great critic is in his bones historical, even if this does not appear in every sentence he writes – or she writes, in the case of Mme de Stael. The great critic takes a long view, surveying all manner of writings with impartial voracity.

But for all the complexity of the task, the great critic continually poses a single question about literature considered as a whole, though its formation differs subtly from one critic to the next. The critic with a classical formation – Dr Johnson, for example, and Matthew Arnold – will pose in some form the question, ‘what is literature for?’ The answer will be moral...