Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Volume 22 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye (review)

What kind of experience one has rereading Anatomy of Criticism fifty years after its 1957 appearance depends on one’s willingness to enter the time warp, to envision the critical scene Frye was confronting, and to understand how this text, maddening in so many ways, became the most influential theoretical treatise of the twentieth century.

In terms of Frye’s career, as his astute editor points out, Anatomy of Criticism was an introduction that metastasized. It was originally designed as a theoretical superstructure to support Frye’s continuing work on Blake and on romantic poetry as a form of scripture, the secular counterpart of sacred scripture, a field that had not (yet) been tamed into ‘Bible as Lit.’ (A glance at ‘Theory of Symbols’ demonstrates Frye’s dependence on Augustine and Dante and their notions of polysemy; the tragic mythos, in the following chapter, constantly flirts with the archetype of the dying-and-returning God, whether he be called Adonis, Tammuz, or Jesus.) At a certain point, though, Frye recognized that the distinctions and issues he had been treating in articles and conference talks were all starting to come together so that, in reorganizing his own meta-commentaries, he had begun without realizing it a synthesis of the entire literary-critical scene. And a synthesis was just what was in order.

In those pre-structuralist days, historical scholarship dominated the academy while the critical scene was illuminated by the New Criticism, for whom every text was a species unto itself. In addition were Freudian critics and a few who took seriously Frazer’s notions about ritual and literature. The four chapters of Anatomy of Criticism reached out to all these fragmented ways of thinking about texts, concluding with a ‘Theory of Genres’ that harkened back to a final synthesis to Hegel’s ideas about aesthetic modes. In Frye’s conclusion, he validated all of these ways of writing with literary texts. Most of all, Frye’s Anatomy fleshed out the Word and enabled the readers of that time to conceive of literature as an organized whole rather than a collected totality, or to visualize coherently how ‘the existing monuments [of the literary tradition] form an ideal order among themselves,’ as T.S. Eliot had claimed in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’

So because of this syncretic reach Anatomy of Criticism was read widely, admired greatly for its wit and learning, and translated into fourteen languages. But because its subject was Literature en masse rather than any text or series of texts, it could not become the hub of a research project. Once Frye had done what he had done, there was nowhere else to take it, except in the sense that others, confronting Literature en masse in quite different ways, might build on Frye’s superstructure, as the Marxist Fredric Jameson did in The Political Unconscious (1981), building his three ‘horizons’ of historical interpretation on three of Frye’s ‘phases’ of the literary symbol. Structuralists, such as Tzvetan Todorov, found in Frye a more kindred though less rigorous spirit. Frye himself never returned to this mode of theoretical syncresis, until it came time for him to elucidate his approach to sacred literature in The Great Code (1981).

Reading Anatomy of Criticism for the first time without this historical context, one finds that the wit and learning survives, although I suspect that today’s readers, knowing that high concepts are cultural constructs, would be suspicious of Frye’s unexamined notion of something Out There called Literature that might have a permanent organizing platform. They might be surprised as well by what Frye’s canon contains and excludes, such as the prominence in Frye’s thought of character-types from Roman comedy, or the near-absence to his mind of female writers or of any colonial writers from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, or South Asia. Clearest of all will be...