The Universal Literary Solvent: Northrop Frye and the Problem of Satire, 1942 to 1957

There has hardly been a book or article on satire written in the last six decades without two observations: an acknowledgement of debt or opposition to Northrop Frye's study in the Anatomy of Criticism (1957)¹ and a caveat that satire is a "notoriously slippery" subject (Hamilton 149). The study of satire and irony in the Anatomy is almost certainly the most influential study of satire in the twentieth century. It is a convention, when making broad claims of this sort, to cite a few major examples of such influence, quote one or two later critics affirming the breadth of that influence, and leave the rest implicit; Hamilton provides as much (149, 265-66 n23). In the case of satire, such is the breadth and depth of Frye's contribution it would be more efficient and appropriate to appeal to readers to come up with a single example of a later critic on whom Frye has not exerted any influence, or anything less than a major indirect influence. Put plainly and historically, Frye completely reshaped our understanding of what satire is and how it works. His study of the prosimetric fiction that Varro Reatinus and Lucian of Samosata nominated as Menippean satire, and which Frye anglicizes as "anatomy" after Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, changed the discourse permanently, and much for the better.² Frye's general definition of satire as "militant irony" (AC 223) is the shortest, most applicable, and most extensible in the criticism. Yet Frye begins his academic career with a far more conventional and profoundly negative view of satire and comes to his understanding of satire as part of the mythic structure of irony much later. Little attention has been paid to Frye's two-decade struggle to come to grips with satire. The great critic curses himself openly on the subject—"God I wish I could stop scribbling this crap" (NBAC 312)—and often trails off with a hopeless "I dunno" when satirically stumped. The origin and progress of the most powerful theory of satire we have remains, as yet, undisclosed.

In Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism, A. C. Hamilton discovers the moment in which Frye begins to come to terms with satire in his early career. Although his commentary on the subject is admittedly a footnote to his survey, Hamilton's insight is so astonishing that it bears almost complete quotation. He first observes: "In the 1944 article ['The Nature of Satire'],³ Frye notes two things as essential to satire: 'one is wit or humour, the other an object of attack' (1944.76); in reproducing this statement in the Anatomy, he adds that the wit or humour is 'founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd' (224)" (Hamilton 150). Hamilton adds the following note, worthy of careful review:

The change, which registers Frye's recognition of satire as a mythos, seems to have been triggered by an image. The 1944 article allows the satirist to possess poetic imagination only "in reverse gear": "poetry may deepen and intensify the imaginative impact of things; satire belittles and minimizes it (1944.79). But then his recognition that perhaps satire was Blake's real medium (FS 193) led him to recognize that "the great satirist is an apocalyptic visionary like every other great artist" (FS 200). This passage in Fearful Symmetry⁴ is followed by an extract from the 1942 article ["The Anatomy in Prose Fiction"], p.42, on the shift of perspective in the satires of Swift, Apuleius, and Petronius, to which he now adds: "In Rabelais, where huge creatures rear up and tear themselves out of Paris and Touraine, bellowing for drink and women ... we come perhaps closest of all to what Blake meant by the resurrection of the body. Rabelais' characters are what Blake called his 'Giant forms'" (FS 200-01). In the Anatomy, he revises, though only slightly, a passage from this same article [...] Imaginative fantasy alone becomes the one essential element that elevates satire to a major literary form [in Frye's thought].

(Hamilton...