Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays by Northrop Frye (review)

HUMANITIES 431 and labels his own methodological approach as 'traditional: meaning by this an eclectic 'close reading ... which allows [him] ... to enter the semantic thickness, to engage the quiddity of the poem' (p xvi). However Lawler graciously acknowledges that there are other (respectable?) 'modes of criticism' which he puts 'here in use' when he finds them 'pertinent in discussing these texts, such as the thematic, the mythological , the moral .. .' (p xvii). In fact, this fuzzy methodology produces a succession of the most uninspiring 'explications de textes: examining successively the poems' 'fond' and 'forme: the latter preferably reflecting the former, an approach that leads to such enlightening statements as: 'As in the other poems we have examined, the form is articulated with precision' (p 89), or 'the texture of sounds ... establishes an interplay of explosives and dentals that conveys high emotional intensity. This is reinforced ... by the frequency of i and open and closed e and .. . by the almost complete absence of nasals' (p 82). Other examples of this sort abound in the book (e.g. , pp 56, 57, 68, and 71). So much for the 'forme.' Similarly, the 'traditional close reading' of the 'fond' yields trivial conclusions such as 'Thus "Jeune cheval ala criniere vaporeuse" brings together nature and eternal art, description and symbolism.' All the poems studied in the book are translated into English, usually with commendable clarity, notwithstanding a few infelicitous choices which force the original sense (e.g., p 37, n 87), or even miss it, as in 'La minutieuse' (p 97, n 37' 'A bullock, far off in his domain' instead of 'in the middle of the road'). In the preface the author acknowledges his 'indebtedness to Rene Char for his generous welcome' (p xvii). One should not conclude from this that the poet has approved Lawler's explication of his work, keeping in mind Char's own words in his luminous text on Rimbaud (1956): 'L'observation et les commentaires d'un poeme peuvent etre profonds, singuliers , brillants au vraisemblables, ils ne peuvent eviter de reduire a une Signification et aun projet un phenomene qui n'a d'autre raison que d'elre' (Recherche de la base el du sammel, "965, p 99). (PAUL BOUISSAC) Northrop Frye. Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Edited by Robert D. Denham University of Chicago Press. viii, 264. $13.00 It is fashionable to excavate the early thinkerfrom beneath the reputation of the later authority. Such activity may be informed by the myth of the fountain of youth, but I'm sure even Professor Frye thinks fondly of that hard-working period in the fifties when these twenty-one reviews (and a hundred more essays besides) were written. He will observe that editors 432 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 often reissue early work to present a mind as if free and untroubled by its later orthodoxy, and that just as often the editing is done to reverse the myth and suggest a development that proceeds like one inexorable current . It probably doesn't matter to Frye which account is the truer in his own case - he is generous with his reputation - but his editors have to make a choice, and Rober Denham, with the resources of his Enumerative Bibliography of Frye, flows with the myth of continuity. He has selected many of the reviews to show a response to grammarians of symbol and other critical authorities during the period of the Anatomy. This is useful enough. But more striking in the collection is an absence of spatial theorizing, and if Denham must present the reviews as foundation stones in the great cathedral of Frye's thought, I prefer to regard them as side-chapels. For they are modest reflections which pause with tact and commitment before often beautifully painted subjects. The concerns are as various as Dante, Don Quixote, the eighteenth century, Valery, Rene Char. And the writers treated are as apparently off the apocalyptic highway as Pound, Hemingway, Orwell, and Wyndham Lewis. On balance, the pieces show the bookmanship of a man alert to his cultural time and place, who is drawn to human oddity and genius with a humanism that is exemplary in...