Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World by David Cook

Abstract

David Cook, Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). 122. $19.95 cloth; $7.95 paper (u.s.) “The image that informs the study is closer to that of the caricature than that of the photograph” (6). With this opening statement of intendon David Cook might seem to deflect the reviewer from any question other than the aesthetics, and ethics, of willed artistic distortion: “A Frye whose features have been pulled and twisted: . . . both fictional and nonfictional.” Blasphemy perhaps, but hardly heresy. Yet in the next paragraph stance and style rejoin the world of conventional academic discourse: “The con­ cern here will be with Frye as a social critic and, in particular, with Frye’s defense of liberalism and his critique of technology.” This “caricature” has, it seems, both context and text. The final sentences of Cook’s “ Preface” confirm, again discursively, the unavoidable pun of the book’s sub-title: “ the New World symbolizes human­ ity’s attempt at forming a new vision. Thus the main theme of this study is Northrop Frye’s ‘America: A Prophecy’ ; a vision of the New World” (6). The illustration facing, Blake’s own title-page, redirects us toward visionary “ caricature,” as do the book’s other illustrations ending with Douglas Mar­ tin’s wryly elevated Frye. Cook’s Northrop Frye, then, is a half-study, half­ vision, in a half-visionary mode, of Frye’s New World both as a specifically North American New World and as the new world of Frye’s total thought. Or so, at the very least, it allows us to take it. Frye’s views on Canadian culture have been widely assessed in all the appropriate places; Cook’s version of these views will no doubt be equally scrutinized for its authority and helpfulness. How complete, how fair, is it to judge the new world of Frye’s total thought by the New World example, symbolic or not, offered by Frye’s specifically Canadian concerns? Can faults in the example, if found, be readily translated into flaws in the concept? So far Frye’s comments on Canadian culture have been occasional in both senses. They are found mainly in The Modern Century, The Bush Garden, and Divisions on a Ground: one set of three talks and two gatherings of assorted chapters, addresses, and reviews, the second less than the first. Cook draws on all these with, so far as I can judge, care. But Frye has not yet made an extended, systematic consideration of Canadian culture comparable to those he has made of Blake, of criticism, and of the Bible. Nor are his collections of Canadian commentary as wide-ranging in cultural and social thought and content as his comparable non-Canadian collections. Should all this affect our response to Cook’s use of these Canadian materials for his version of Northrop Frye? What, then, of Frye’s vision of another, more universal new world: one shaped imaginatively by “intrinsically educational and architectonic . .. kinds 349 of knowledge and experience that should become the informing principle for civilized life,” a transformed, apocalyptic, anagogic “living in the here and now as if in the kingdom of love and freedom.” 1 For years Frye has maintained that as to “ the social reference of literary criticism . . . I have written about practically nothing else.” 2 Yet such critics of Frye as Graff, Jameson, and above all Lentricchia, question either the genuine presence of such an activity or the adequacy of its results.3 For Terry Eagleton at his most dismissive, “Northrop Frye and the New Critics thought they had brought off a synthesis of the two [technocratic rationality and spiritual wholeness], but how many students of literature read them today?” 4 (More, perhaps, than Eagleton can see from his personal centre of the universe.) Such criticisms call for reply on their own discursive, analytic ground, some full re-assessment of Frye’s authority as general cultural and social critic as well as of his Anatomy of Criticism’s importance to, and grounding in, general cultural and social concerns, Marxist or Arnoldian. David Cook does not engage such critics of Frye directly, either through conventional...