History and Utopian Desire: Fredric Jameson's Dialectical Tribute to Northrop Frye

Abstract

he majestic critical system set out in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism appears to be pulled in two self-consciously inconsistent directions. On the one hand, the archetypal critical project announced in the Anatomy raises literary creation and criticism to the level of symbolic meditation on human community whole. Archetypal criticism is, Frye declares, primarily concerned with literature social fact and mode of communication (99). Poetry has the social function of expressing a vision of the goal of work and the forms of (106). From this view, criticism is supposed to chart certain relationship between literary phenomena and historical life. On the other hand, the historical perspective the Anatomy promises is reprivatized in the anagogic moment. The collective content of utopian desire is ultimately internalized and individualized in an ecstatic celebration of unconditioned libidinal freedom. The anagogic view of criticism conceives of literature as existing in its own universe, no longer commentary on life or reality, but containing life or reality in system of verbal relationships (122). This is the moment when history appears to