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.