that perhaps he would ultimately be found less useful as a systematizer than as a quarry for later thinkers, “a kind of lumber-room … a resource person for anyone to explore and get ideas from.” He also declared his own indifference to his future reputation: “If posterity doesn’t like me, the hell with posterity — I won’t be living in it anyway.”
Perhaps the major contemporary criticism of the Anatomy was that the book minimized the writer’s immediate involvement in and meaning for his society. To Frye’s annoyance, the literary establishment associated him particularly with two specific ideas, that criticism should be a science, and that the role of the critic was not to evaluate individual works. For some objectors, this turned literature into an autonomous verbal structure to be studied in and for itself, cut off from social history, from its authors’ concerns, and from the realistic representation of the world. The Fryegian critic seemed a dry anatomist, utterly uninvolved in the needs of his readers for guidance and wisdom, and of his society for literary discourse.
Even on a personal and biographical level, the notion that Frye as a critic was removed from society and its concerns was radically unjust, as he was always deeply involved in Canadian culture. He may have worked out his critical principles from his study of William Blake, but he honed them on Canadian poetry: for ten years, from 1951 to 1960, he wrote the “Poetry in English” section of the University of Toronto Quarterly’s annual survey of Canadian literature, for which he had to read virtually all the poetry published during the preceding twelve months. This, in the days before the full flowering of Canadian literature, must have been tedious at times, but wit and wordplay abound in Frye’s reviews, whatever may be said of the poems themselves.
Although, as a “reviewing” rather than a strictly “academic” critic, he had to relax his stand against value judgments and offer some guidance about what was worthwhile reading, he never attempted to tell the poets how to write. Margaret Atwood described Frye’s usefulness to the writer in terms of his recognition of genre: “We all know the doggerel poem about critics: ‘Seeing an elephant, he exclaimed with a laugh, / What a wondrous thing is this giraffe.’ Perhaps one of his greatest gifts to writers was his lifelong work to ensure that if you created an elephant, it would never again be mistaken for a giraffe.” In these reviews, he concentrated on encouraging conversation about Canadian poetry and in developing an informed reading public that would allow that poetry to flourish — which it did in part thanks to his efforts.
On a theoretical level, Frye turned to probing the backbone of the Anatomy, the existence of a literary universe that provides an imaginative vision for society. While continuing to produce a stream of practical criticism — books on Shakespeare, Milton, and T.S. Eliot, articles on the Renaissance, Yeats, Joyce, Samuel Butler, and numerous others — he also wrote works of general theory such as The Well-Tempered Critic (1963) and The Critical Path (1971) that explore the relation between critic, poet, and society. In The Critical Path, subtitled “An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism,” he put forth some important new conceptions of social development. According to his analysis, there is a constant dialectic in human history between the myth of concern and the myth of freedom. The myth of concern is society’s central mythology, the body of what it believes as a society and what holds it together. (Later Frye split this into the primary concerns essential for survival, and the secondary concerns of religion, politics, and ideology.)
Authors, Frye says, tend to be children of concern, in that they address mankind’s enduring hopes and fears through their images of wish and nightmare, and their depiction of the business of loving, gaining a living, and facing death. Against this concern stands the myth of freedom, a sort of liberal opposition which criticizes the myth of concern from an individualistic, often scientific, point of view. Included in the myth of freedom are all the academic disciplines, which must be conducted as scientifically as their subject matter allows, and must not have any ideological bias or outside loyalties. Literary criticism is one of these disciplines, indeed a central one: its subject matter may be concerned, but it must itself remain in the myth of freedom.
In the background of this defence of the critic or teacher’s freedom from ideological and social constraints — indeed, part of the reason for undertaking it — was the student revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, with its demand for immediate “relevance” and moral engagement in university studies, along with individual choice of a congenial curriculum. Frye was actually spending a term as visiting lecturer at Berkeley when the first violent student unrest broke out in the spring of 1969, leading him to say that the student radicals reminded him of a sentence in an old cookbook: “Brains are very perishable, and unless frozen or pre-cooked, should be used as soon as possible.” His response was consistently to defend the values of a traditional, disinterested liberal education. “An arts degree is useless,” he would say, “if it isn’t, it isn’t worth a damn.”
Frye saw that the student came to university stuffed with the clichés and received ideas of society, which were essentially unreal and phantasmagoric. Fads come and go, endless consumer goods are consumed or thrown away, politicians are assassinated, millions mourn a Diana they never knew. For four years, the student could withdraw himself from this society, and concentrate on the more stable forms proffered by mankind’s achievements in the arts and sciences: on the authority of the logical argument, the repeatable experiment, the compelling imagination. In the light of this vision provided by culture, the student will become a radical critic of what is — not a “well-rounded individual,” with its comfortable overtones of contentment and softness, but maladjusted and crotchety, “a critical and carping intellectual,” “probably one of that miserable band who read the Canadian Forum.”
But sometimes Frye wondered if it was too late, worrying that by the time a student reached university it would be impossible to influence his mind, since it was already pre-programmed by television and advertisements. He became involved in schemes for earlier education, helping to found a curriculum institute in which university professors joined with elementary and high-school teachers to suggest improvements in the school curriculum, and later overseeing the production of a series of English readers for grades seven to thirteen. His concern was to keep the imagination in play, for only through imagination could the individual think metaphorically and engage in the play of mind through language that constructed reality in human form.
The most striking of the shorter essays that continue to discuss this theme, “The Responsibilities of the Critic,” given as a speech at Johns Hopkins University in 1976, marks a vital transition in Frye’s approach and is almost a manifesto for the second half of his career. In this talk, he is less concerned with the articulation of the literary universe as a whole than with the transformative potential of individual works. Concentrating on the reader and the act of reading, Frye contends that literary works may become a focus of consciousness and open up new worlds of perception. “It seems strange,” he says in the essay “Expanding Eyes” (1975), “to overlook the possibility that arts, including literature, might just conceivably be what they have always been taken to be, possible techniques of meditation … ways of cultivating, focusing, and ordering one’s mental processes.” He talks of Blake’s offering his works in this spirit, not as icons but as mandalas, things for the reader to contemplate to the point at which he or she might reflect, “yes, we too could see things that way.” The critic has a role in unlocking the power of such prophetic writers, helping to turn literature from an object to be admired to a power to be possessed. He does so not by judgment but by an act of recognition: “What the critic tries to do is to lead us from what poets and prophets meant, or thought they meant, to the inner structure of what they said,” thereby opening a window into the created world.
Increasingly, Frye turned to the powers of language in all its aspects, literary and non-literary, to convey vision; latterly, he tended to define himself as a “cultural critic” rather than a “literary critic.” In Words with Power, Frye studies this kerygmatic or prophetic authority in both the Bible and literature. He invokes Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime in describing those dazzling moments in our response to art when the ego is dispossessed and “all the
