The Universal Literary Solvent: Northrop Frye and the Problem of Satire, 1942 to 1957

Abstract

There has hardly been a book or article on satire written last six decades without two observations: an acknowledgement of debt or opposition to Northrop Frye's study Anatomy of Criticism (1957) (1) and a caveat that satire is a notoriously slippery subject (Hamilton 149). The study of satire and Anatomy is almost certainly most influential study of satire twentieth century. It is a convention, when making broad claims of this sort, to cite a few major examples of such influence, quote one or two later critics affirming breadth of that influence, and leave rest implicit; Hamilton provides as much (149, 265-66 n23). case of satire, such is breadth and depth of Frye's contribution it would be more efficient and appropriate to appeal to readers to come up with a single example of a later critic on whom Frye has not exerted any influence, or anything less than a major indirect influence. Put plainly and historically, Frye completely reshaped our understanding of what satire is and how it works. His study of prosimetric fiction that Varro Reatinus and Lucian of Samosata nominated as Menippean satire, and which Frye anglicizes as anatomy after Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, changed discourse permanently, and much for better. (2) Frye's general definition of satire as militant irony (ac 223) is shortest, most applicable, and most extensible criticism. Yet Frye begins his academic career with a far more conventional and profoundly negative view of satire and comes to his understanding of satire as part of mythic structure of much later. Little attention has been paid to Frye's two-decade struggle to come to grips with satire. The great critic curses himself openly on subject--God wish could stop scribbling this crap (NBAC 312)--and often trails off with a hopeless I dunno when satirically stumped. The origin and progress of most powerful theory of satire we have remains, as yet, undisclosed. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism, A. C. Hamilton discovers moment which Frye begins to come to terms with satire his early career. Although his commentary on subject is admittedly a footnote to his survey, Hamilton's insight is so astonishing that it bears almost complete quotation. He first observes: In 1944 article ['The Nature of Satire'], (3) Frye notes two things as essential to satire: 'one is wit or humour, other an object of attack' (1944.76); reproducing this statement Anatomy, he adds that wit or humour is 'founded on fantasy or a sense of grotesque or absurd' (224) (Hamilton 150). Hamilton adds following note, worthy of careful review: The change, which registers Frye's recognition of satire as a mythos, seems to have been triggered by an image. The 1944 article allows satirist to possess poetic imagination only in reverse gear: poetry may deepen and intensify imaginative impact of things; satire belittles and minimizes it (1944.79). But then his recognition that perhaps satire was Blake's real medium (FS 193) led him to recognize that the great satirist is an apocalyptic visionary like every other great artist (FS 200). This passage Fearful Symmetry (4) is followed by an extract from 1942 article [The Anatomy Prose Fiction], p.42, on shift of perspective satires of Swift, Apuleius, and Petronius, to which he now adds: In Rabelais, where huge creatures rear up and tear themselves out of Paris and Touraine, bellowing for drink and women ... we come perhaps closest of all to what Blake meant by resurrection of body. Rabelais' characters are what Blake called his 'Giant forms' (FS 200-01). Anatomy, he revises, though only slightly, a passage from this same article [...] Imaginative fantasy alone becomes one essential element that elevates satire to a major literary form [in Frye's thought]. (Hamilton 266 n24) will go further than Hamilton and argue that Frye's earliest conception of satire was also governed by an image--the very conventional one of satire as an acid, a literary corrosive, or caustic--and that change Frye's thought was occasioned by an even more specific image from his study of Blake: one of poet-illustrator's actual media, his etching acid. …