Book Reviews

Anatomy of Imagination

Northrop Frye (Author) and Germaine Warkentin (Editor)
The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1933-1963. University of Toronto Press
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Northrop Frye (Author)Robert D. Denham (Editor)
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. University of Toronto Press
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Reviewed by Graham Nicol Forst

It’s difficult to imagine the tradition of western literary criticism missing Northrop Frye’s now 50-year-old masterpiece Anatomy of Criticism or its briefer popularization, The Educated Imagination. Harold Bloom said rightly that the Anatomy, at the time of its publication, established Frye as “the foremost living student of Western literature.” How many thousands of teachers (this reviewer included) learned, from Anatomy, to teach literature from a systematic, organized, “scientific” perspective instead of being influenced by fads, or acting like a vanguardist of political or religious doctrines. Herbert Marcuse’s brilliant late revision of Marx’s aesthetics made the same social claim as does Frye’s critical theory: we do not submerge, but release the means of social change and true enlightenment when we use art to educate the imagination rather than indoctrinate the brain.

The Educated Imagination was the name Frye gave to his quickly-written mass-market version of the Anatomy that was presented as the Massey Lectures on the CBC in the winter of 1962. It is republished here as Volume 21 of the Collected Works along with various other reviews, essays, articles, lectures and even books (the “cloggedly earnest” Well-Tempered Critic [1961] is included) on critical theory which Frye wrote from his early student days until his fiftieth birthday. And however anachronistic it sounds now to hear talk about the need for “co-ordinating principles” and “central hypotheses,” for a belief in a “big interlocking family” of literature, or some fanciful “order of words”; and however dated seem such tacit assumptions of “the greatest classics” and “humanity’s sacred scriptures” and so forth, it’s still refreshing to read that literature can “refine our sensibilities” and render us “less likely . . . to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things.” Somewhere inside themselves, all teachers of literature must feel something like this.

Volume 22 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye offers the second recent reincarnation of the Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton UP’s reprint appeared in 2000 [see review CL, Autumn 2003]). The major advantage of the present Collected Works version over the Princeton version is the thorough, thoughtful and lovingly detailed Introduction and notes (together taking up almost 200 pages) by Robert D. Denham.

Denham is clearly the best man on Frye around today. A co-editor of the massive Frye Collected Works, he took over, for unannounced reasons, the editorship of this seminal volume from the eminence gris of Frye studies, A.C. Hamilton, opening the question as to why it is that the foremost work of literary criticism ever written by a Canadian must, in both recent reincarnations, be introduced by a foreign critic neither prepared nor inclined to deal with the Anatomy as a Canadian book. For it is, after all, worth asking: could Anatomy of Criticism have been written anywhere other than in Canada? Is it not too subversive to have been written in the US (recall Frye’s sympathy with Marxism and his lifetime attachment to the CCF/NDP); is it not too dryly witty to have been written by an American, or too Low Church for any Englishman (other than Blake)? Too detached and ironically distanced to have been written by a direct heir of any strong literary tradition? And how much of Frye’s thinking and sense of freedom to speak and his growing confidence and fame were encouraged and warranted by his close connections with our national radio by the extraordinary fertility of the scholarly environment at the University of Toronto, and by his lionization by the hero-starved Canadian public? No less an authority than Margaret Atwood thought that Frye’s cartographical strategies were uniquely Canadian—this compulsive mapping out of unknown territory so it could be occupied intelligently and systematically, with an eye to social justice.

Having said which, Denham’s Introduction and notes are extraordinary and will prove valuable to all Frye scholars present and future, especially the very honest and thoughtful discussion of the relationship between Frye and the poststructuralists—Derrida, Jameson, Kristeva and others. He does however make the odd claim, possibly designed to make Frye respectable to postmodernist readers, that Frye’s procedures are those of a “bricoleur” and Anatomy of Criticism a work of “bricolage”—an odd claim to say the least for this most logocentric and deductive of critics. (Denham does however pull back from this claim later in his Introduction, when he calls Frye “our greatest literary taxonomist.”) And when, in answer to observations about Frye’s declining reputation, Denham cites statistics that show Frye was among the “250 most-cited authors in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1976-1983,” one wonders about the relevance of that observation 25 years later.

The long-term critical value of the Anatomy of Criticism and The Educated Imagination cannot be regarded as given—time changes things too much ever to make such a claim. But certainly, these books stand as irrefutable testimonies to the ability of clear thinking, articulate feeling and precise and risible wittiness to confirm the power of art, and the necessity for and ability of the arts to construct humanity out of reality, as god did Adam out of red clay. That this was said to modern audiences more clearly in Canada than anywhere else, and by a Canadian, ought to make all Canadians proud.

Both of these volumes are meticulously edited (although Virgil’s and Samuel Clemens’ cognomens are, as in previous volumes in this series, misspelled as “Marro” and “Longhorne”). The Introductions are generous, the notes very detailed and helpful—and it is a particular pleasure to see in The Educated Imagination some photographs of Frye and those who influenced him during his long life.

A final point: purchasers of these two volumes will be puzzled, if not upset, at the degree of repetition they contain, raising the whole question of the obsessive-compulsive nature of these sorts of Collected Works projects. Was it really necessary, for example, to publish both versions of the Well-Tempered Critic (written within a year of each other and essentially the same); or to publish each and all of the separate essays which later will turn up, almost verbatim, as every chapter of the Anatomy of Criticism (especially since Frye’s Notebooks for the Anatomy of Criticism is due to be published next as Volume 23)? As Frye himself said in one of his Notebooks, “the great secret is something you can’t reach unless you shut up.”

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #195 (Winter 2007), Context(e)s. (pg. 141 - 143)

***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.