In this book, Northrop Frye sets out to further the practice of literary criticism, which has yet to progress very far, in his opinion, from Aristotle. His aim is not to eliminate various schools of criticism, whether historical and formal or what was in his day the New Criticism. Instead, he constructs a system of organization capable of containing them all, one whose orientation is not the individual literary work as much as literature as some sort of Platonic ideal (which is not simply the aggregate of all literary works).

The result is what Terry Eagleton calls “a mighty ‘totalization’ of all literary genres.” It is a structuralist approach, as reflected in his original title, Structural Poetics (which his editor insisted on changing). The intended title combined his debt to Aristotle’s enduring work on literary criticism, from whom he borrowed his organizing principles, and what Frye sought to bring to the discussion. The title adopted in its place also owes a telling debt: to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, one of Frye’s favorite books.

However, Frye’s structure is not imposed a priori; he works inductively, based on seemingly omnivorous yet attentive reading.

Frye combats the notion that criticism is a parasitic endeavor by citing an analogy, physics. Physics, he writes, is “an organized body of knowledge about nature. A student of it says he is learning physics, not nature.” He envisages a similar relation of criticism to literature.

It’s easy to imagine how this approach might calcify in the hands of adepts, devolving into rigid classification. Frye, however, is not a slave to his system: “Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must learn to recombine them.” Many pleasurable works have elements of more than one mode. It seems that Frye offers a typology (or system of typologies), useful for coming to grips with any work of literature.

The value of this becomes apparent when he turns to literary works in prose, for which, he notes, Aristotle and the other Greeks did not provide us with a term, as they did for other genres. Frye notes the misunderstanding caused by the everyday use of the term fiction (the opposite of fact), as well as the widespread use of the term novel, which is but one of four chief strands of fiction he identifies (the others being confession, anatomy, and romance; as always, combinations are possible and do exist). Failure to recognize these strands results in judging Wuthering Heights a less successful novel than Pride and Prejudice when it is not a novel in Frye’s estimation but a romance.

Since Frye’s terminology abounds in transliterated Greek terms, neologisms, and words commonly used in another sense in everyday parlance, I found the Glossary at the end of the book helpful.
This book was a challenging read. Many passages were enjoyable and enlightening, while others were a slog. Yet the effort I expended to stay with it was amply rewarded. It helped that the text is peppered with memorable aphorisms such as, “The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows” and, “At the centre of liberal education, something surely ought to get liberated.”

That last sentiment alone might cause this book to be removed from the library shelf in some states, so read it while you can. ( )

I first learned of Northrop Frye from reading Harold Bloom. In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Bloom wrote: “Yet when I think of the modern critics I most admire - Wilson Knight, Empson, Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke - what I remember first is neither theories nor methods, let alone readings. What return first are expressions of vehement and colorful personalities: …Frye cheerfully characterizing T.S. Eliot's neo-Christian account of civilization’s decline as the myth of the Great Western Butterslide...”

Continue reading here: https://www.bankswesterncanyon.com/post/book-review-anatomy-of-criticism ( )

"For some of those writers she seemed to prefer look on much of what is called criticism as a hollow show of gestures and illconsidered utterances maintained partly to fulfil the petty expectations of those preoccupied with what can be safely predicted, but chiefly to provide scope for the perceptive to foresee what they know can never come about."

first essay: classification/systematization can be made use of when understood as a negative constraint against the worse kind of writing (that which is "anything and everything")

third essay: demonic archetype of a million lifeless undergraduate essays

fourth essay: an understanding of The Consolation of Philosophy as a Menippean Satire (aka 'Anatomy') does not open the text, though it allows one to heap further praise upon Joyce. Ulysses understood as possessing, "all four types: novel, romance, confession, anatomy." (money success fame glamour). Finnegan's Wake as all of the above plus the 'Encyclopedic': biblical /scriptural component and therefore even better.

Understanding of criticism as an automated process:

"Some such activity as this of reforging the broken links between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept, is what I envisage for criticism. [...] I mean only that if critics go on with their own business, this will appear to be, with increasing obviousness, the social and practical result of their labors."

Erudition has its rewards:

"We can understand [Rousseau] well enough without extracting the myth, [but] there is much to be gained by extracting the myth if the myth is in fact, as we are suggesting here, the source of the coherence of his argument."

And then sometimes we are surprised by an aside:

"Kierkegaard has written a fascinating little book called Repetition, in which he proposes to use this term to replace the more traditional Platonic term anamnesis or recollection. By it he apparently means, not the simple repeating of an experience, but the recreating of it which redeems or awakens it to life, the end of the process, he says, being the apocalyptic promise: 'Behold, I make all things new.'"

katabasis
pharmakos
dianoia
apodosis
apocalyptic - elegiac ( )

Sure, I guess, it's an oversimplified model ...? But read it, because it might give you insights ... plus it hearkens back to a time when criticism was written to be consumed and understood by mortals & meaning wasn't willfully obscured because ... well, because the author *could*. ( )

"Evil may yet be good to have been and yet remain evil." That's how I feel about having read this book.

If you hover over the stars of Goodread's rating system, each rating is described in terms of how much one "likes" a given book. These descriptions are inadequate. I chose 3 stars for this book not because I liked it – in truth, much of it I despised while reading it, insofar as it evoked any emotion from me – but because I did find some useful portions within the somewhat absurdly complex system ... ahem, "anatomy" ... that Frye creates.

As has been my wont with works upon which I don't feel wholly equipped to offer meaningful commentary, I will simply provide below some enjoyable, or at least useful, quotes from the book itself.

p. 33: In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero's power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.

p. 74: Literary meaning may best be described, perhaps, as hypothetical, and a hypothetical or assumed relation to the external world is part of what is usually meant by the word "imaginative."

p. 82: Aristotle speaks of mimesis praxeos, an imitation of action, and it appears that he identifies this mimesis praxeos with mythos.... Human action (praxis) is primarily imitated by histories, or verbal structures that describes specific and particular actions. A mythos is a secondary imitation of an action, which means, not that it is at two removes from reality, but that it describes typical actions, being more philosophical than history. Human thought (theoria) is primarily imitated by discursive writing, which makes specific and particular predictions. A dianoia is a secondary imitation of thought, a mimesis logos, concerned with typical thought, with the images, metaphors, diagrams, and verbal ambiguities out of which specific ideas develop.

p. 243: The present book employs a diagrammatic framework that has been used in poetics ever since Plato's time. This is the division of "the good" into three main areas, of which the world of art, beauty, feeling, and taste is the central one, and is flanked by two other worlds. One is the world of social action and events, the other the world of individual thought and ideas. Reading from left to right, this threefold structure divides human faculties into will, feeling, and reason. It divides the mental constructs which these faculties produce into history, art, and science and philosophy. It divides the ideals which form compulsions or obligations on these faculties into law, beauty, and truth. Poe gives his version of the diagram (right to left) as Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense.... Similarly, we have portrayed the poetic symbol as intermediate between event and idea, example and precept, ritual and dream, and have finally displayed it as Aristotle's ethos, human nature and the human situation, between and made up of mythos and dianoia, which are verbal imitations of action and thought respectively.

p. 347: The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination. The imaginative element in works of art, again, lifts them clear of the bondage of history. ( )