Frye, Northrop (1912—91)
Canadian literary critic and theorist renowned for his innovative use of Jung, Carl’s theory of archetype and myth. Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Frye studied English at Victoria College in Toronto. He then studied theology and completed his orders to become a minister in the Uniting Church of Canada in 1936. He did pastoral work for a short period, and then took a scholarship to go to Merton College, Oxford. After completing his studies at Oxford he returned to a position at Victoria College, where he remained for the rest of his career, eventually rising to the rank of Chancellor. He was very much a public intellectual determined to raise the profile of literary criticism and demonstrate its importance to non-academic readers. The lectures in The Educated Imagination (1963) were originally broadcast on Canadian radio and from 1968 to 1977 he served as a board member for the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunication Commission, which regulates the media in Canada. Frye’s first book, a study of the English poet William Blake, Fearful Symmetry (1947), brought him immediate international attention because it offered a powerful counterpoint to the dominant New Criticism, overturning its textual isolationist policy, but retaining its close reading technique in modified form. Frye describes the New Critics as being like visitors to an art gallery who stand so close to the picture all they can see is the texture of the paint, whereas his preference is to stand so far back that the content blurs and reveals itself as a pure archetypal outline. In contrast to the New Critics, Frye read literary texts in relation to both other literary texts (indeed, for Frye this literally meant all literary texts---his viewpoint was astoundingly synoptic) and the social context which yielded them in the first place. Literature has to mean something to its readers Frye thought, by which he meant it has to serve a social purpose. Hence his interest in myth, which for Frye are complex allegories concerning the relation between humans and their gods. Frye systematized his thinking on myth in what is by far his best known work, and indeed for many one of the most important works of criticism of the twentieth century, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Myth, for Frye, centres on the mobilization of archetypes (which he conceives slightly differently from Jung, Carl, though with an obvious awareness and admiration for him), arguing that it is the production of archetypes that saves literature from creating mere stereotypes. Frye uses the notion of displacement (comparable, though not the same as Freud, Sigmund’s notion of displacement) to account for the way mythic structures can permeate realist or naturalist texts, even though the magical elements have been stripped away---James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is the best-known example of this. Between the extreme of pure myth and so-called realist texts (a word Frye objected to) lies romance. Thus, Frye proposes that there are three orders of myth. He balances his analysis of myth with a study of modes, symbols, and genres, thus creating one of the greatest literary typologies ever produced. Some critics have found his ceaseless classification of types oppressive, while others have seen it as a precursor to structuralism, and for both these reasons Frye’s work has fallen into a state of relative neglect. Yet as Jameson, Fredric shows in The Political Unconscious (1981), Frye’s typologies can be used to great effect for contemporary criticism, even if one does not agree fully with his ontology. Frye was a prolific author right up until his death. He wrote books on Canadian literature, T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. Further Reading: J. Ayer Northrop Frye: A Biography (1989). I. Balfour Northrop Frye (1988). C. Cotrupi Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process (2000). J. Hart Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (1994).