"Deep Frye"

The New York Review of Books

Volume 4, Number 6 · April 22, 1965

Deep Frye

By Frank Kermode

A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance

by Northrop Frye

Columbia, 159 pp., $3.75

…

And here, I think, is the clue to what finally invalidates Frye. If literature does the work that ritual and myth once did, the arrangement is providential, for myth and ritual can obviously no longer do it. What makes literature different is, roughly, a different reality principle, appropriate, in an expression of Eliade's which Frye himself quotes, to this time as myth was appropriate to that time. The difference between illud tempus and hoc tempus is simply willed away in Frye's critical system, but it is essential to the very forms of modern literature, and to our experience of it. I do not mean simply that in the literature of our own time, which is itself considerably complicated by the prestige of myth, we are made aware of the conflicting claims of rigorous fact and comforting fiction; in my generalization I include Shakespeare, and especially the Shakespeare of the tragedies. King Lear dies on a heap of disconfirmed myths, and modern literature follows Shakespeare into a world where the ritual paradigms will not serve, and magic does not work; where our imaginative satisfactions depend on a decent respect for the reality principle and our great novels are, in the words of Lukacs, "epics without god."

And even Shakespeare's romances belong in hoc tempore. We do not accept their conventions as we accept those of popular tales, simply as given for our ease and comfort. The tough verse forbids that, and so does the particularity of what happens on the stage. The statue that moves might enact the Pygmalion myth, were it not that Perdita in all her vitality stands motionless beside it; and that it is shown how no chisel could ever yet cut breath. It is the breath of Hermione, the presence of Perdita, that are lost to view as you stand back; you sacrifice them to a system and a myth. The conclusion seems obvious: when you hear talk of archetypes, reach for your reality principle.

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Mirror and Mythology

Northrop Frye, Creation and Recreation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 6-7.

...

Our envelope, as I have called it, the cultural insulation that separates us from nature, is rather like (to use a figure that has haunted me from childhood) the window of a lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mirror of our own concerns, including our concern about nature. As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of its existence. But occasionally the mirror turns into a real window, through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature that got along for untold aeons of time without us, seems to have produced us only by accident, and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so. This vision propels us instantly into the opposite pole of paranoia, where we seem to be victims of a huge conspiracy, finding ourselves, through no will of our own, arbitrarily assigned to a dramatic role which we have been given no script to learn, in a state of what Heidegger calls ‘thrownness.”

The cultural aura, or whatever it is, that insulates us from nature consists among other things of words, and the verbal [Page 7] part of it is what I call a mythology, or the total structure of human creation conveyed by words, with literature at its centre. Such a mythology belongs to the mirror, not the window. It is designed to draw a circumference around human society and reflect its concerns, not to look directly at the nature outside.

...

Northrop Frye: Imagination

Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 102-103.

Literature, then, is not a dream-world: it’s two dreams, a wish-fulfillment dream and an anxiety dream, that are focused together, like a pair of glasses, and become a fully conscious vision. Art, according to Plato, is a dream for awakened minds, a work of imagination withdrawn from ordinary life, dominated by the same forces that dominate the dream, and yet giving us a perspective and dimension on reality that we don’t get from any other approach to reality. So the poet and the dreamer are distinct, as Keats says. Ordinary life forms a community, and literature is among other things an art of communication, so it [Page 103] forms a community, too. In ordinary life we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination. Underneath literature there’s another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols, like the Queen and the flag, or around certain gods that represent order and stability, or becoming and change, or death and rebirth to a new life. This is the myth-making power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another.