Introduction: A ‘Permanent Appointment’?

I remember stocking up on clothes at one of the stores near the university that made their living out of students, and were very knowing about university gossip. The clerk asked me what I was studying, and I said, with a touch of shrillness, that I was teaching. Just for the summer, of course. He wrapped my parcel, handed it to me, and said ‘And I hope your permanent appointment comes through all right.’

–Northrop Frye, reporting to Victoria College on a summer teaching in Seattle after his Guggenheim year (1950–51) at Harvard. (CW 7: 54)

This special issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly celebrates the centennial of the birth of Northrop Frye in 1912. It was in the Quarterly in 1942 that Frye, then a thirty-year-old ordained minister teaching in the Department of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto, published his first full-fledged academic article, ‘Music in Poetry’ (CW 21). In 1950 he succeeded the late E.K. Brown as reviewer of Canadian poetry in the journal’s annual ‘Letters in Canada’ issue. Over the next five decades he went on to become the most distinguished man of letters in the history of English Canada and a critic of world renown, read widely by academics and, in a period when such writing was increasingly specialized, by non-academics as well. His study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry (1947), announced the advent of a major critical talent, and Anatomy of Criticism, which followed a decade later, set afoot a lively and often acrimonious debate about the immense theoretical structure Frye proposed in it. Discussion and controversy did not abate as he progressed shyly but magisterially through a long career as an idolized classroom teacher,¹ literary critic of world stature, cultural commentator on his native land, college administrator, and public servant.

Since his death in 1991 Frye’s ideas have continued to be as vigorously promoted and as vigorously scorned. That’s a familiar pattern in the reputation of a major figure, as the critic’s work is slowly absorbed into the past, present, and – it goes without saying – the perceived future of criticism. Thus, Eleanor Cook recognizes that Frye’s ‘combination of taxonomy and the visionary was congenial to the nineteenth century, and he may have been one of the last great thinkers in a learned, liberal tradition with roots in that era.’ Germaine Warkentin sees Frye in the setting of the great generation of philosophers and theorists stretching from Wittgenstein (b. 1889) through Lacan, Adorno, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, de Man, Foucault, and Derrida (b. 1930) (CW 21: xxv). Frye’s students identify him with his innovative course on the Bible and Literature, and in later years, the course he taught on Shakespeare in Victoria’s largest classroom. As for Frye himself, a photograph of 1969 (Figure 1) depicts him modestly in the back row at a conference among his professional colleagues of the period 1950–90, figures like M.H. Abrams, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Walter Ong, and J. Hillis Miller who routinely read his work and argued over his ideas and influence in reviews and at conferences.

Their debate was a fierce one. In the Anatomy Frye had rejected evaluation as a primary function of the critic, offering in its place an immense, carefully developed interpretative system which he termed ‘archetypal criticism.’ Despite the advent of the New Criticism, in the 1940s the task of the critic was still seen as assessing the ‘value’ of a work; he (it was almost always ‘he’) was regarded more or less as an arbiter of taste. Gently dismissing his own reviews of Canadian poetry twenty years after they were published, Frye said they were ‘too far in the past to do the poets they deal with any good or any harm, not that they did much of either even at the time. In any case the estimates of value implied in them are expendable, as estimates of value always are’ (‘Preface’ to The Bush Garden, viii; CW 12: 418).

Frye’s rejection of evaluation baffled his critical...