Northrop Frye (1912-1991)
I.
Many (anti-modernist) writers continue to exploit ancient myths as a literary resource, even when they have ceased to be meaningful in any vital sense. And many critics still like to delve into what Philip Larkin referred to dismissively as the myth-kitty in order to interpret what they might otherwise find impossible to comprehend.
As Deleuze and Guattari point out, there's nothing easier than to read in this way; "you can always do it, you can't lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing" [1] and even if the mythological (and related psychological) approach to literature is ultimately reductive; i.e., one that degrades the object of its study.
II.
I suppose if there is one name above all others associated with myth-crit, it is that of Northrop Frye, author of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a work whose very title betrays a certain morbidity of thinking and the fact that Frye ultimately regards literary criticism as a mortuary enterprise.
Frye posits the idea that all literature is founded upon myth - particularly myths concerning the cycle of the seasons and different phases of the agricultural year. Even the most sophisticated fiction can thus be read as archetypal - i.e., full of archetypal characters, archetypal events, and archetypal themes.
For me, this is a form of monomania: or, at the very least, it is shaped by myopia. For in order to view things in this manner he has to turn a half-blind eye to the huge differences between modern literature and ancient myth, forcing everything individual into what Nietzsche calls a universal mould, so that all sharp corners and distinct outlines are blunted and blurred in the interest of uniformity.
An archetypal approach will never have much time for precision; it will always deal in approximations and generalities. It is a distorted and deceitful understanding of literature that integrates and coordinates difference into a network of correspondences and similarities so as to "render consistent with one another categories that are no longer compatible in the modern understanding of the world" [2].
Ultimately, Frye and his followers use myth to reinforce the reign of the Stereotype and crush production of the New, thereby preserving the old order or what D. H. Lawrence refers to as the
Great Umbrella.
Any contemporary text - even the most
avant-garde in character - is immediately coordinated within the archetypal framework and even the most transgressive authors are passed off as
myth-makers who are concerned with universal truths and eternal patterns of meaning, rather than singular events and unique individuals.
Frye effectively covers everything and everyone in a thick layer of maple syrup (or what Barthes terms doxa). Supporters may pretend to locate within his criticism all kinds of potentially liberating elements, but it best serves to support a model of bourgeois realism based on the essential facts of human experience; i.e., those things that go without saying and thus need no further explanation. Far from opening up the future, he uses the past to reaffirm the present.
III.
Like Frye, the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer is another idealist who fantasises about a mythic unconscious and treats myth as a primordial symbolic form; i.e., a kind of non-discursive language that is not only more archaic than logic, but also more vital.
For Cassirer, modern writers who explore the recesses of mythic consciousness should be valued above all others; for they keep us in touch with the very springs of our humanity. But as one critic asks, how can Cassirer and his admirers possibly know this:
"As we have no way of demonstrating that the mythopoeic ability of a modern writer is an archaic residue [...] there is not much point in saying it unless one happens to thrill at the very suggestion that primitive vestiges are present in modern man." [3]
This sounds a little flippant, perhaps, but I think a crucial point is being made here. For despite the "dreary earnestness of so much myth-critical writing", there is little doubt that many readers find the language used strangely seductive, resounding as it does with "awe-inspiring words [...] which promise to [...] put us directly in touch with the eternal and the infinite and the Wholly Other" [4].
In short, the language used by myth-critics is basically a rhetorical trick for soliciting approval from the faithful.
But like Deleuze and Guattari, I'm more interested in critics who suggest experimental methods of reading, rather than simply interpret a text; who ask how a book works, rather than what it means; who concern themselves with surfaces and lines of flight, rather than origins and depths.
For like Deleuze and Guattari, I think the aim of criticism is not to rediscover the eternal or universal, but to locate the conditions under which something new might be produced. Great books are never really concerned with the recounting of past experiences and memories - nor are they a place in which one merely confesses one's dreams and fantasies. They are, rather, sites of becoming and, as such, concerned with multiplicities, not myths.
Notes
[1] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 41.
[2] Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, (Polity Press, 1994), p. 114.
[3] K. K. Ruthven, Myth, (Methuen, 1976), p. 74.
[4] Ibid., p. 78.
This post is a revised extract from 'On the Abuses and Disadvantages of Mythology for Life: A Timely Meditation', in Stephen Alexander, Visions of Excess and Other Essays, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 219-253. For a related post - also extracted from this essay - on Nietzsche, Voltaire, and myth, click here.
