Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose ed. by Robert D. Denham (review)

Engines of understanding

Does literature have a social function? If so, what? Or—wait—that’s a stupid question. Literature must have a social function—otherwise, why would it exist—and in every culture in human history? But if literature has a social function, what is it? What is literature “for”? Then there is that other question: What is literature, anyway? If “literature” is a legitimate category, something that corresponds to a reality, then what characterizes it? Or is the category just a mystification, a kind of illusion? Academics are not that interested in these questions. But the questions are there, in the manner of the elephant in the room. In the manner of the elephant in the room, to ignore it just makes it more pressing, especially if you happen to make your living in the field. What is the social function of literature/ English studies? Why have English departments? After years of “austerity,” these are now “existential questions,” even if no one seems too interested. In fact, despite decades of New Historicism, no one knows much about the relation between trends in literary study and socio-economic-political context. But at least one major figure spent a career on the “existential questions”: Northrop Frye. This collection offers plentiful evidence of Frye’s interest. But Frye himself is now an elephant in the room, someone who is there but not there—a strange figure, an outsider in literary/cultural studies, whose ideas are now rejected but were never really absorbed or digested.

Frye is arguably the most original thinker Canada has produced.¹ His impact from 1950 to 1975 was enormous. That influence screeched to a halt in the late 1970s. New Historicists would notice the timing—a critical historical moment: the end of the “golden age” of capitalism following World War II. Then followed stagnation. For about 90 percent of the population real wages today are what they were in the mid-70s, despite unprecedented gains in productivity.² The 1 percent extracted unprecedented wealth. But for most, stagnation deepens—indebtedness balloons. In the postwar period, incomes grew; social democracy was normative, with provision of education and health care and infrastructure and spending on the arts as well as on university research. That was Frye’s period: a rebellious period in which words like “liberation,” “vision,” and “imagination”—Frye words—had actual social force. “The aim of education” he wrote, is “to make people maladjusted,” “to destroy their notions that what society” does makes “sense.”³

There remains a hardy group of “Frye specialists,” but it’s small and they tend to treat Frye as a humanist-philosopher—not someone whose ideas one builds upon or applies. In other words, not as a thinker to use, not as an approach for analysis more generally, in the way that one might use Bourdieu or Benjamin or Butler or Eisenstein. That is, they view Frye as an object of study rather than, as he would have preferred, as a method—as presenting a way of thinking. Their concern is naturally with questions like: Is he compatible with Derrida? (He’s not.⁴) Frye specialists produce valuable work,⁵ but specialists tend to write for specialists. Meanwhile, the mainstream of English studies—if there is a mainstream—long ago decided that Frye and his “myth criticism” were wrong⁶ and has exiled him and his “myth criticism,” putting Frye in a category somewhat like Frazer or Spengler or possibly Jung—idiosyncratic intellectuals without real scholarly validity, despite flashes of brilliance. Still, the very fact that interest persists is significant.

Economic stagnation, our New Historicist would notice, coincided with the tidal wave known as deconstruction, which swept through literary studies by the late 1970s. Then, equally suddenly, the New Historicism (soon indistinguishable from the old historicism, with sociological/gender adaptations) arrived, displacing deconstruction from its throne. Deconstruction continues to fascinate, thanks to a cohort of graduate students trained in its outlook, students who got...