“Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrop Frye

So I finally finished reading “Anatomy of Criticism” today. The first 150 pages and the last 50 page are fascinating reading, but I did get bogged down in the middle as he tried to prove his theories instead of just explaining them. Proving ideas is always the more tedious duty of scholars, undoubtedly why pundits avoid it.

 

Frye’s attempt to free literary criticism from the tides of philosophy gave me a lot of food for thought. He was tired of literary criticism being dragged in the wake of Marxism, feminism, etc, and preferred to find an independent means of literary analysis. To do so, he has to hope that literature has an inner logic of its own independent of culture. Sometimes he sounded a little like a bridge player who knows in order to win the hand he has to play as if the distribution of the cards is in his favor, and if not, oh well, at least he tried.

 

He often compares his image of literary logic to math.  Math is a symbolic representation and perhaps underpinning of science; perhaps literature could be a symbolic representation of reality.  Math works so well that it can make predictions about reality as well as any scientist.  Someone asked Einstein if he was worried an experiment would disprove his theory; he said he wasn’t worried because his math was correct. If literary criticism is equally valid then maybe the educational value of reading novels would finally be proven, even if only concerning the psychology of people.

 

Thus, Frye spends a great deal of time defining terms, and this is where it starts getting tedious. But if he wants to shape the debate, the first step to control the definitions. The book picks up again when he starts discussing the literary nature of “The Bible,” the book that more than any other shaped our literary world.  Most of our conceptions of heroism, morality, and coming of age stories can be traced back to “The Bible.” Stories about the fall and redemption in characters abound in literature, while “The Bible” is about the fall and redemption of humanity.