Abstract
Northrop Frye is a famous Canadian literary critic, but his fame enjoyed its peak in the 50s and 60s as a representative of the myth-archetypal school of literary criticism. When deconstruction was on the rise, it faded greatly, and what’s more, sometimes Frye was taken as a notorious obstinate structuralist. In fact, even his fame as an archetypal critic is not based on a genuine grasp of his thought, and he himself declared that he resented being classified into other schools which he did not belong to. This misunderstanding is an outcome of the difference of awareness between him and the logical and reasoning literary critics, with the former taking the free flow of life’s energy, the full function of the vital but unpredictable Holy Spirit as the Truth while the latter holding that truth is a correspondence between mind and the outer world, be it social, psychological or natural. This article is an attempt at a full comprehension of the Spirit, and based on this, a full understanding of Frye and his should-be influence on our literary and actual life. It first tries to elucidate the Spiritual dimension and the life state when it is forgotten or refused, and then it devotes itself to the discovery of this dimension and the entering into the Spirit; which is a major structure of all aspects of Frygian thoughts.
Highlights
When in 1947 Northrop Frye described the characteristics of Blake’s artistic works (FS 13-4) and the public reception of him as an artist (FS 3-5) and when he admitted Blake as his guru and that his life style had been on an unconscious level imitating him (SM 16), surely, he hadn’t realized that his career and fate as a critic are profoundly the same as those of Blake as an artist
Through this rise and fall, Frye’s real argument is still buried underground, eluding our grasp. Just as he said of his guru Blake to the effect that his poetry had never been really appreciated and that it was only by cutting the major part of his works away that literary historians had been able to stuff him into their history as a minor pre-Romantic (FS 3), it is only by casting away the central point of Frye that we see Frye taken by literary theory historians as a myth-archetypal critic
As is said above, the fundamental problem in our understanding of Northrop Frye is that we are in different worlds and when we apply the truth correspondence generated from our logic to him we will infallibly miss the point; the first we should do in order to get to know him is to see in what way we are in different worlds and talking about different things with seemingly the same language
Summary
When in 1947 Northrop Frye described the characteristics of Blake’s artistic works (FS 13-4) and the public reception of him as an artist (FS 3-5) and when he admitted Blake as his guru and that his life style had been on an unconscious level imitating him (SM 16), surely, he hadn’t realized that his career and fate as a critic are profoundly the same as those of Blake as an artist. What is ironic here is that Frye was circling around one point, critics always focus on the circumference of the circle and fail to grasp the center, which naturally makes their understanding of Frye both partial and wide of the mark He is, as what he described poets are, always on a stock exchange, which means that his reception, cold or warm, is not based on a full and just evaluation of his thoughts, but on the personal anxiety of the evaluator. Robert Denham’s Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World is, to me, the most thorough and insightful treatment of Frygian thoughts ever seen and a fruit of years of unremitting research His effort to rationalize Frye on the basis of religion and Hegelian dialectic largely diverts the reader’s attention from what is really important; and what’s more, the form of the book, which is a list of different terms, makes it even harder to discover the shape of Frye, though these terms are really essential. I will adopt the shape of a fall-and-rise process to trace how “life and spirit” are gradually buried underground and how they can be possibly regained, which is the shape of Blake’s poetry, Frye’s thoughts and the Bible which is a major source for both of them, with the aim to make it clearer what is the direction of Frye’s effort so that Frye’s central idea may have its real influence on literary criticism
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