Critical Polyphony: The Second Essay in the Anatomy of Criticism

Abstract

CRITICAL POLYPHONY: THE SECOND ESSAY IN THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM JU DITH W EIL University of Manitoba N o r t h r o p Frye spent much of his career demonstrating that it is de­ sirable to be in several minds at any one time. He pointed out that our categories generally “interpenetrate” with one another and that our philoso­ phies imitate “that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought.” 1 Not surprisingly, Frye’s comparison of the Menippean satire or “anatomy” to the novel has often been cited as evidence that his own Anatomy of Criticism is more creative than analytic. In a recent fine essay on Frye’s style, Bert O. States reports his discovery that he was reading Frye “mainly for pleasure” (458). States praises Frye’s “wit” in the highest terms that our age of criticism has to offer. He links Frye’s “categorical absurdity” and particularized “centripetal” criticism to that of Derrida and Barthes (476). And he associates the Anatomy as a whole with Brueghel’s detached visions of Flemish life — the street scenes, the carnivals, and, above all, the intricate Tower of Babel (471-73). These analogies are so appealing that I would like to believe them. I would like to agree with that wisely foolish reader, Robert Kroetsch, when he con­ nects Frye and Bakhtin as liberating influences in The Lovely Treachery of Words. For Kroetsch (who may, of course, be deliberately misreading here), Frye is a carnivalizing prophet who has taught Canadian writers that “guile and violence . . . are the basic stuff of narrative” (159). Like States’s, Kroetsch’s Frye sounds distinctly post-modern, and post-modernists, as Linda Hutcheon keeps reminding us, are by and large guileful ironists, tricky parodists. Why not include Frye in this wonderful and provocative company? One reason for doubting Frye’s affiliation with ironists is that he generally does not hide his meanings. When ironists stop revelling in absence and indeterminacy, most of them start speaking duplicitously. A strong sense of disjunctiveness does resound in Frye’s notorious dry mocks, and many of his readers have relished what Angus Fletcher called the “low comedy” of Frye’s style.2But to use irony in this way is not necessarily to be a full-time ironist. T.S. Eliot once questioned “the use of irony to give the appearance of a philosophy of life, as something final and not instrumental.” When irony does become a philosophy of life, Eliot surmised, it becomes “an evasion of the difficulty of living, where it pretends to be a kind of solution of it” E n g l is h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19, 2, June 1993 (quoted by Ricks, 6). Frye’s treatment of irony suggests that like Eliot he may have distinguished speculative instrument from philosophic stance. In the Anatomy, he complained that “an ironic provincialism . . . is in the ascendant,” and asserted that “no set of critical standards derived from only one mode can ever assimilate the whole truth about poetry” (62). In The Critical Path, he wrote that irony “is not the centre of human reality but only one of several modes of imaginative expression, and it is a function of the critic to provide some perspective for irony” (132). My main concern here will be to argue that the Second Essay of the Anatomy, “Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols,” provides such a “perspective.” It exposes the limita­ tions of irony as a mode of criticism — that of the new critics “ascendant” in 1957, but also that of their successors in post-modern theory. To clarify the difference between philosophical ironists and a Frye who uses irony as an instrument, it may help to begin by considering the exam­ ple of Richard Rorty. This philosopher was hired several years ago by the University of Virginia’s English department in order, as Nathan Scott, a de­ partment member, put it, to “keep them honest” (63). Their idea was that since “large philosophical claims of one kind or another are implicitly being made in all systematic theory of literature . . . such claims need to be fully aired and carefully examined...