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.

Making It Explicit: Frank Lentricchia's "Versions of Existentialism"

Literary critic Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism (U of Chicago Press, 1980) makes explicit the connection between Wallace Stevens and Sartre. FL does not accomplish this feat by means of historical reconstruction (i.e., he makes no effort to prove "influence"); rather, he recognizes the conceptual kinship between Sartre's philosophical project and Stevens's poetic one.

FL took his cue from Frank Kermode's implicitly Stevensian book The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction wherein Kermode traces "the long tradition of postromantic epistemology which begins with the reorientation of the knowing subject effected by Kant and is later radicalized in directions that Kant would never have approved" (ANC, p. 31). The figures who radicalized Kant included Nietzsche, Vaihinger, William James, Ortega y Gasset and, last but not least, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose early work, according to FL, embodies "its ultimate extension" (ibid).

Yet it is Stevens, and not Sartre, who stands out in Kermode as "the culmination and summary representative" of what FL terms "the conservative fictionalist tradition in modern poetics and philosophy" (ibid). This tradition "captured the American theoretical imagination because it appeared to offer a clean break" with the "grander aestheticism" of Northrop Frye's Anatomy and the New Critical "isolationists of the image" (ANC, pp. 31-32).

Stevens's "conservative fictionalism" resides in his view of "truth" and "reality" as "alien" beings and as "'violence' which ever pressures us." The imagination, on the other hand, "is the response of our subjective violence which presses back against an inhuman chaos. Imagination makes space between us and chaos and thereby grants momentary relief from sure engulfment, madness, and death. With ['truth' and] reality so horribly privileged, fictions may be understood as heroic evasions..." (ANC, p. 33).

FL pronounces Stevens an "existentialist" because his "dominant theme is the stubborn independence, the final freedom of being from mind and the priority of natural existence over consciousness" (ANC, p. 34). For readers of Sartre, this dichotomy should sound oddly familiar. Like Sartre's ontological distinction between being and nothingness, Stevensian "poetics is a two-term system where fiction and reality engage in endless and complex play in which one term, while open to qualification by the other, always successfully resists subsumption by its opponent" (ibid).

These intriguing parallels merit further consideration and will receive it as we continue to explore the Sartre-Stevens connection.

More Notes on Sartre and Wallace Stevens

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford: OUP (1953), p. 335:

Coleridge very carefully kept science, poetry, and religion distinct by attributing each, primarily, to its appropriate faculty of understanding, imagination, and reason. It was only in the early Victorian period, when all discourse was explicitly or tacitly thrown into the two exhaustive modes of imaginative and rational, expressive and assertive, that religion fell together with poetry in opposition to science, and that religion, as a consequence, was converted into poetry, and poetry into a kind of religion.

Sartre and Stevens were both heirs to this early Victorian shift. Sartre converted its epistemological dualism into the phenomenological ontology of being and nothingness; Stevens into the metaphysical dualism of reality and the imagination.

Notes on Sartre and Wallace Stevens

From the entry "Poetry" in the Continuum Encyclopedia of American Poetry, p. 900.

Wallace Stevens was another modernist poet whose influence would be deferred for many years; he was a symbolist like Eliot rather than an imagist like Pound and Williams. Stevens was an existentialist as well. Most of his poems were expositions of the proposition that mankind ought by now to have grown out of romantic notions that there is a god who created the universe and looks after everything in it. To believe in such a creator is to blind oneself to the fact that people need to perceive life with "a mind of winter"--as Stevens wrote in his poem "The Snowman" from his first book Harmonium (1923)--and become responsible for their own actions, make their own order out of the chaos of existence.

Kant's Universalism/Heidegger's Obscurantism/Sartre's Cosmopolitanism

In the fourth thesis of his Idea for a Universal History, Immanuel Kant proposes a sociology of conflict anchored in an anthropology of "unsocial sociability." According to Kant, human beings enter into social bonds which they subsequently strain to the breaking point with their desire to assert their individual proclivities.

Kant argues that, far from being a "design flaw," this built-in tendency to conflict is Nature's way of forcing human beings to realize their innate powers.

Hegel will, of course, develop a similar schema into his famous dialectic. Marx will absorb Hegel and, in the process, invent the conflict model of modern social science.

Sartre is heir to this entire Enlightenment project. At the same time, he reaches back to Parmenidean ontology: there is being and there is nothingness. Unlike Parmenides, however, Sartre will not privilege being over nothingness. For Sartre, as for Kant, it is what we lack that drives us to invent ourselves vis a vis the herd.

In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre doubled back to re-examine the herd and find its potential (previously unremarked by him) as the mass. Following Marx, Sartre became convinced of the revolutionary potential of the mass as individuals struggle with themselves and with each other to realize that which they are not and have not.

This is why I contend that all of Western philosophy is mere prelude to Sartre. Heidegger arrogated to himself the role of Western philosophy's midwife to a new way of thinking, but Heidegger's new way of thinking proved to be little more than the old way of thinking clothed in a German peasant's smock. He abandoned the challenge posed by Kant's universalism after he soured on National Socialism. He pretended to mysticism, but delivered only mystification and "post-modern" obscurantism.

Sartre absorbed Heidegger or, rather, those parts of Heidegger he found useful, and discarded the rest (a truly judicious use of the Heideggerian corpus). Attuned always to what is lacking, Sartre saw clearly that a new way of thinking was not necessary, but new ways to act. Heidegger had begun with that premise (existence precedes essence) but became confounded somehow: he became lost in the labyrinthine lucubrations that characterized his years of post-war exile and silence.

Not so Sartre. Perhaps because he abandoned academic philosophy, perhaps because he remained active in politics, in Paris cafe society, in the world of art and literature, Sartre remained faithful to his Copernican insight that "freedom from" and "freedom for" constitute philosophy's true subject and humankind's true interest. And rather than set himself up as some sort of gnostic eminence (a la Heidegger), knowing "the way" to thinking, knowing "the way" to language, Sartre knew only the way to nothingness. He knew this because he knew that nothingness is what eludes us and that what eludes us is forever with us. The way to nothingness is, therefore, always open.

As Parmenides put it: "What is there for thinking and for being is the same." That sameness bored Sartre. Besides, thinking is a way open only to the few. Action is open to everyone: therefore, nothingness (not being) is where the action is. What we lack is what we strive for; ultimately, it is also what we achieve.

Only the joke's on us. For every achievement is something, not nothing; and every achievement is something we will want freedom from. In this manner, Kant's Nature, Hegel's Spirit, Marx's matter carry on their eternal struggle through Sartre's Cosmopolitan ontology.

Philosophy begins with Parmenides and finds its true "end" (as Heidegger punned) in Sartre--who turned Parmenides on his head. What is not there for thinking and for being is not the same: it is difference. Heidegger wished to bury philosophy but only managed to give it a new lease on life. Sartre did not wish to bury philosophy but finally managed to bring it to rest--so that our true labor could begin. Again.