Anatomy and Bionomics of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Cases

Abstract

ABOUT A THIRD OF A CENTURY AGO, as a Harvard undergraduate, I decided to sign up for a course on literature and myth, but after some debate. A man named Frye was giving it; I had never heard of Mr. Frye; a professor, maybe, but not a Harvard professor; would he meet the level of sophistication that we Harvardians expected and deserved? The first lecture dried up my doubts like a laser beam hitting a mosquito puddle. A mob of other students, probably faculty too, pressed to hear those lectures, which changed venue to a vast, dim crypt in the Fogg Art Museum. There Mr. Frye revealed to us on endlessly recycled blackboard space much of his forthcoming book, Anatomy of Criticism. As astounded baritones cry out in Italian operas, Cielo! Qual lampo! and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays this lampo flashed for forty minutes of lecture and ten minutes of virtuosic answers to queries from all comers. Of course I became an ardent Fryean. I rushed off to read Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell and the epigones of Jung; I strove to read Blake; best of all, in blissful April I bought Anatomy of Criticism moist from the presses, and I devoured it with an intense combined pleasure of rediscovery and new insights. Rereading Anatomy of Criticism in 1990, I found myself once again amazed by its scope, its audacity, its typical level of insight, its contrapuntal narrative logic. I was also wakened, as I could not have been in 1957, to its potent response to ideals current at the time, my own ideals then. With a bracing boom-time confidence, Anatomy of Criticism upholds apolitical purism, the example of science, and above all, a system for sorting systems. That fed us what we craved in those