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.