A Further Irony

A further irony of Edward Said's criticism of Northrop Frye lies in the fact that Said's limited grasp of history (the very thing for which he chastised Frye) prevented him from recognizing the implicitly revolutionary nature of Frye's embrace of Blake.

For to adopt a Blakean stance is to open the door to radical politics: the kind of politics that Blake himself espoused and that threatened to "turn the world" of mid-seventeenth century England "upside down."

Frye's politics were a left-leaning bourgeois liberalism--fairly tepid by Blake's standards and by Said's (not to mention this author's). In Frye's defense, however, he spent most of his adult life during a portion of the 20th century that saw left-liberalism make solid gains in the implemented policies of the democracies of Europe, Scandinavia, and North America. Frye's confidence in the reformist programs of Western governments was reposed in facts on the ground and thereby warranted. The hyperbolic posturings of the "academic Left" no doubt struck him as beside the point. It was a different time than the one we inhabit now. Said's critique makes no allowance for Frye's historical context.

The political implications of Blakean humanism were succinctly expressed by one of Blake's radical precursors, Gerrard Winstanley, in a tract entitled A Watch-Word to the City of London (1649):

Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he hath enemies ... True freedom lies in the community in spirit and community in the earthly treasury, and this is Christ the true man-child spread abroad in the creation, restoring all things unto himself (cited by Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, London: Penguin (1991): 107).

What would become Blake's humanistic Christology, with its wealth re-distributing political implications, is set out quite clearly in Winstanley's tract for anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see. We can only speculate what Frye would make of the present political climate in North America were he still with us; based upon his close reading of Blake and his subsequent articulation of a Blakean humanism, one can only imagine that his left-Liberalism would be far less tepid than it was in the latter half of the 20th century.

Northrop Frye's Blakean Humanism

As Tony Davies demonstrates throughout his slim volume Humanism in Routledge's New Critical Idiom series, the term "humanism" eludes straightforward definition. Indeed, in his glossary, the entry for "humanism" reads: "An undefinable term, possibly obsolete." His definition of a "humanist" is even better: "A teacher and writer of books. A superman. A deluded wretch, deserving pity and contempt. None of the above. All of the above" (Tony Davies, Humanism, 2nd edition, London: Routledge (2008): 150). This is perhaps a prime example of humanistic gallows humor, of the characteristically dry Anglo-Saxon variety, but it is not without merit as an honest appraisal of the state of the "-ism."

As a card-carrying humanist and Chomskian Left Libertarian, I cannot help but admire humanism's "anarchic" inability to get its story straight. If Davies had been able to nail down a clean definition of humanism in his little study, I would have taken that as a signal that the time had come to go shopping for a new ideological homeland.

The trouble with humanism, as Davies reminds us throughout his book, is human beings. Its redemption is variety. Thankfully, there are many ways of being human, and many ways of reflecting on what being human can and ought to mean.

At the end of his life, the great humanist and academic provocateur Edward Said gave a series a lectures that were later collected under the title "Humanism and Democratic Criticism" (Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, NY: Columbia U. Press, 2004). Like so much of Said's scholarship, these lectures were both learned and informed by his hair-trigger political consciousness. Also like so much of Said's scholarship, they contain a certain amount of ad hominem critique of other scholars that is not always fair, and not always accurate.

Take, for instance, his remarks on Northrop Frye. Said describes The Anatomy of Criticism (published in 1957) as Frye's "summa" (Said, p. 39). Frye himself accounted for his Anatomy as a book that he had to write so that he could go on to write (decades later) what were, for him, the books that truly constituted his "summa," i.e., The Great Code and Words With Power. But then Said goes on to say something about Frye's humanistic project that is insightful though, again, not precisely correct: his "purpose was nothing less than an attempted Blakean-Jungian synthesis of the humanistic system organized into a mini-life-world ... The core of Frye's amazing invention is what Blake called the human divine, a macrocosmic man..." (ibid).

Yes and no.

Frye's humanism was deeply and unapologetically Blakean. His thought, however, owed nothing to Jung. He remarked somewhere (either in an interview or in his notebooks) that he was unaware at the time that he chose to speak of "archetypes" that Jung owned the patent on that term in the minds of academics. Presumably, Said attributed Jungian influence to Frye on that basis. For his part, Frye rejected the notion of a "collective unconscious" and never associated his notion of literary archetypes with it. If he was indebted to anyone for his use of the term "archetype," it was Oswald Spengler.

I omitted from the above quotation Said's other criticisms of Frye on the ground that they reflect, at best, a superficial reading of the corpus of Frye's work. Suffice to say, the accusation of Eurocentrism is applied to Frye in a heavy-handed manner--a trademark move of Said's and a charge to which Frye would have pled guilty on the ground that he was, openly and unashamedly, a scholar and critic of European literature. But, then, so was Edward Said.

Said's companion criticism, that Frye's approach to literary study was a-historical and, therefore, a-political, is best answered by Hayden White's exasperation with all who have leveled similar charges at Frye: "It seems incredible that anyone who has taken the least trouble to read any of Frye's work would credit him with such a banal conception of culture, literature, and history" (Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins (2010): 264). The frustrating thing about Edward Said's criticism of other scholars is that he all too often appears to have failed to have taken the least trouble to read their work. This failure is nowhere more evident than in Said's own magnum opus (not to say "summa"), Orientalism.

It is not my intention, however, to blacken the memory of Edward Said. I have learned from and profited much from Said's critical interventions over the years and I salute his unflagging and outspoken moral courage on behalf of Palestinian humanity. I miss the articulate voice with which he gifted the dispossessed and voiceless and I believe that his death has diminished us all.

Frye's purpose throughout his long and distinguished career was "nothing less" than an "attempted" Blakean humanism, the core of which was Blake's notion of the "human divine" or "macrocosmic man." What Frye sought to do with Blake was expand the limits of the humanistic imagination at a moment when what is called "human" was being reduced to "mere" matter by a positivistic scientism, on the one hand, and even eliminated from consideration altogether by an anti-humanistic Structuralism, and then post-Structuralism, on the other.

As Frye's Anatomy amply showed, he was not at all adverse to analyzing the products of human genius in terms of "structure"--again, a clear Spenglerian debt. Architecture can be, after all, a triumph of human creativity. Even when it is mundane and pedestrian, the human urge to build habitation is a "structuralist" compulsion. But, for Frye, as for every other sensitive human being, there is a difference between a house and a home. What that difference is--how it makes a difference--is the question to which Frye would continually return.

William Blake expressed this human difference as "divinity"--for the simple reason that post-Christian talk of human difference has a tendency to lose sight of the upper reaches of the humanly possible and fixate upon the lowest common denominators of social and/or biological determinism. And mark well: Blake was no Christian in any conceivable doctrinal or dogmatic sense of that term. Nor was he a theologian. Instead, he was a humanist who averred that all we can know of God is limited by our knowledge of "man" (generically understood).

Christ was a powerful symbol for Blake because it expanded the imagination of what is humanly possible. He was not interested, however, in an evangelical "personal relationship" with God through Christ. Instead, he argued that, because Christ was human, "Christ-ship" was within the grasp of every human being. And "Christ-ship" for Blake, as for Frye's Blakean humanism, means an expansive understanding of what being human can and ought to mean.

Philosophers of Human Freedom: Sartre and Northop Frye

Hayden White was right to celebrate Northrop Frye as a thinker who, like Sartre, "was nothing if not a philosopher of human freedom, of artistic creativity, and beyond that of a generally human power of species self-creation" (White, The Fiction of Narrative, p. 266).

There are several reasons why the term "literary criticism" is not synonymous with the name Northrop Frye; none of these reasons are any good. They include:

1. Frye was Canadian and therefore not to be taken seriously unless the subject is ice hockey.

2. Frye learned to think by reading Blake and the Bible; most people, even educated ones, have difficulty reading either. The notion that they might learn to think by reading them is simply beyond their capacity and, therefore, out of the question.

3. Frye's knowledge of art, literature, religion, and politics was encyclopedic and put most of his critics to shame.

If all of Western philosophy is more or less prologue to Sartre, all of Western literary criticism is more or less prologue to Frye.