Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives (review)

I still remember the excitement on first reading Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism as a graduate student at Peking University in China in 1979, after the disastrous Cultural Revolution. A friend sent me the book from Rochester, New York, when even Peking University Library didn't have a copy, which only added to my plaisir du texte. In the winter 1980 issue of Waiguo wenxue yanjiu [Studies in Foreign Literature], I published 'Frye's Critical Theory,' which was the very first essay on Frye published in mainland China. Given my longtime interest since then, I feel especially happy to find a collection of essays published by the University of Toronto Press on Frye from Chinese and Western perspectives.

The collection offers a rare opportunity to have a glimpse into some interesting but little-discussed aspects of Frye's writings related to the East. Though Frye is unquestionably a 'product of Western culture,' Robert Denham shows that he did 'wade more deeply into Eastern waters than his public writings suggest.' It is surprising to find Frye struggling with esoteric but important Buddhist concepts, trying to align them with Western ones in 'an experiment of the translation of ideas'; and it is revealing of the magnanimity of his mind that he believed in cross-cultural translatability and rejected 'false antitheses about Eastern & Western thought.' G.N. Forst discusses the connection of Frye and Kant, and from the East-West perspective, one can see even more in that connection and understand why Frye's ideas should prove so relevant and attractive to intellectuals in post-Mao China. Against the orthodoxy of socialist realism and the utilitarian idea that arts and literature must serve the socialist state, it is not difficult to see the enormous appeal of Frye's notion of the liberating power of 'free play' and his Kantian emphasis on the 'disinterestedness' of the aesthetic. The same can be said about Jean O'Grady's discussion of Frye's humanistic vision of the university and liberal education. The concept of a 'socially disengaged university' is as relevant today in China as it is in the West.

Frye's international reputation rests on his encyclopedic conceptualization of myth and archetypal criticism, which leads from literature to philosophy and religion and from an aesthetic to a social and spiritual vision transcending the reality we know. Several essays in this collection, particularly G.R. Gill on Frye's last major work, Words with Power, and Jan Gorak on his first important essay, 'The Argument of Comedy,' elucidate this point with clarity and persuasiveness. The section on Frye and Canada firmly establishes Frye as a major figure in the formulation of the Canadian literary tradition, and shows how his critical theory relates to major works of Canadian literature. Most readers, however, may feel especially interested in the section on Frye and China, as it provides a rare opportunity to learn about the reception and influence of Frye's works in a very different country. Unfortunately, I find that section rather weak. Ye Shuxian's survey of the reception of myth and archetypal criticism in China does provide useful information. He mentions my 1983 essay, but ignores my earlier (1980) and much fuller account of Frye's critical theory, and thereby cuts short the history of Chinese reception by several years. Wu Chizhe considers Frye's 'applicability' to 'Chinese realities,' but he fails to understand Frye or Chinese literature adequately. Statements like the following are simply wrong: 'In China, tragedy as a dramatic form ... emerged with the rise of the bourgeoisie in about the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries'; Shakespeare wrote 'tragedies of character,' in which 'a mere flaw ... eventually leads to his own destruction,' a point Frye has specifically refuted in Anatomy of Criticism. Finally, Gu Mingdong's effort to find correspondence between Frye's modes of mimesis with the stages of a child's evolving ego only reduces Frye's rich and highly imaginative theoretical argument to...