Criticism's Relationship to Literature

Quotations from Northrop Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism”

 

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to ‘learn literature’: one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature…criticism, rather, is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak.”

 

Looked at it from this perspective, is philosophy then the attempt to study how to be wise, history the attempt to understand political actions, and criticism the study of how to write better? No, because that would reduce science to the attempt to make better technology, which is, by the way, the position in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” that the primary goal of science is to find better ways to do things, not just satisfy human curiosity. But I digress.

 

 All metaphors are imprecise, of course. I can definitely see the primary benefit of studying history being the improvement of politics, even if as a child I read history because it engaged my imagination.  I mostly read political and military history because I enjoyed the military conflicts between great generals and the debates between great politicians. It wasn’t until I took AP history that I realized the importance and interesting aspects of economic and cultural history that I now realize are the context of generals and politicians alike. I remember an article I read that the democratic spirit of American soldiers gave them a tactical advantage in WWII because American squad leaders were more likely to make decisions on their own while their German counterparts were more likely to wait for orders.

 

The idea that philosophy is a “verbal imitation of” wisdom which is a “human productive power which in itself does not speak” requires precise definition of those terms. You have to define wisdom by your actions and philosophy by the understanding of those actions. For example, we could debate the wisdom of a President’s decisions, and our argument would reveal our philosophy.  We made decisions all the time, often without thinking about it because we ‘just know’ what to do; philosophers try to figure out why we know what we ‘just know.’ In this light, criticism helps us to understand why we like or dislike various books.

 

But physics is just one way of studying one part of nature. There’s also biology, chemistry, etc. Is criticism more like physics or is it more like science, a collection of disciplines?  Given the number of different philosophies of literature, I’d say “criticism” is more of a general term like science than a specific term like physics. But Frye’s point is that criticism is not just another kind of literature, which was apparently a common idea when Frye wrote his books. He’s after objectivity in criticism, without which there is little justification for critics. If you can’t be objective about literature, critics are just better read and more verbose snobs.