The project to read and blog about Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays continues. Today, I’d like to welcome my first guest blogger, Paul Raven, better known to many as head wrangler of Futurismic, who will be introducing us to Frye’s first essay, on ‘Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes’.
Take it away, Paul …
With hindsight, Frye’s essay on historical criticism was probably the least suited to my own literary experience; most of the texts and authors to which he refers I know as names and titles only, and my understanding of classical literature in particular is woefully inadequate. Hence many of the modal terms deployed here are known to me only in their (apparently much corrupted) modern vernacular usage. (Though I am at least aware that a certain Ms Morissette’s understanding of irony was somewhat off the mark…)
But hey, why let ignorance get in my way? It’s never stopped me before, after all. 🙂 That said, the gist of Frye’s modal scale (which I assume to be some sort of synthesis of critical frameworks established long before his time) immediately provides me a new way of categorising a text, and props the framework up with a sense of historical flow. This moves from the pure mythologies in which all literature and storytelling is rooted, through to “romantic” legends and folk tales, on to the high and low mimetic modes (wherein man starts writing about man as measured against his environment and/or his fellow man), and out into the ironic mode (in which, if I have understood Frye’s definitions and successfully translated them into my own idiom, man starts looking at the big picture and wondering where the hell god might be found, if indeed god is to be found at all). This flow matches the changing conception of man’s relationship to the world around him: a kind of descent from the naïve grace of classicism, if you like. This sense of downward motion is implicit in Frye’s words (“… we can see that European fiction, during the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its center of gravity down the list… “), but thanks to his introduction I must charitably assume there is no subconscious value-judgement in this use of a vertical scale. 😉
After Frye has introduced these basic modes, we’re off into a whole raft of other classifications (the subtypes and cross-pollinations of tragedy and comedy, for instance), all illustrated with references to texts with which I am, to my shame, almost universally unfamiliar. This makes a mockery of any attempt on my part to assess the usefulness of Frye’s theory as expounded in this essay; the most I could hope for is some sort of Chinese Room / Turing Machine processing of interlinked items for which I have little or no context.
However, I do manage to get a sense of the general utility of this sort of approach to criticism… possibly because much of the genre criticism I’ve read at length tends to make use of the genre’s history as a framework. One gets to see how changing attitudes to the world have informed literature over time, and that is far clearer to see over the shorter timescale of genre’s existence (though again my own familiarity with genre by comparison to literature-as-a-whole is probably helping a lot); to come up with a similar theory of historical criticism tailored to genre would not only be useful but a lot of fun (though it would also be a lifetime’s work, I suspect, starting first with an examination of all the previous attempts at such).
One potential axis for plotting the historical development of genre (which leapt out as very familiar) is the mimetic tendency:
Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and ac curacy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle’s word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story.
I don’t know about elsewhere, but the bugbear of plausibility is still a big issue in genre criticism, though I tend to associate it with the sort of old-school advocacy of “hard” sf that acts for me somewhat like a leper’s bell. But the paragraph above concludes with the following:
Reading forward in history, therefore, we may think of our romantic, high mimetic and low mimetic modes as a series of displaced myths, mythoi or plot-formulas progressively moving over towards the opposite pole of verisimilitude, and then, with irony, beginning to move back.
Thinking about Frye’s own historical standpoint compared to my own, I wonder if he’s pointing here to what I’d think of as the first stirrings of post-modernism: I get the feeling that the ironic re-ascent of Frye’s scale has progressed considerably since the writing of this essay, if not completed itself, with the end result that his linear table becomes something more like a colour wheel (or, to use a more genre-typical image, a Mobius strip). All modes are admissible in the postmodern landscape, but specific audiences have accreted around certain modes and mixtures thereof, each with their own dogmatic attitudes to literature which inevitably fail when projected onto texts from a different section of the colourwheel. (Hence, for instance, the tension between the polar opposites of the ultramimetic Mundane manifesto and the more legend-flavoured sf of the Analog/Asmiov’s scene; two flavours of fiction that can coexist historically, but whose audiences are almost completely mutually exclusive.)
In summary, then, Frye’s specific modal theory is largely useless to me thanks to what he would – quite rightly – decry as my insufficient familiarity with the grand corpus of literature. However, what is very apparent to me is the way in which the modes allow him to slice through the literary lightcone and extract elliptical sections that allow for interesting comparisons of otherwise very different types of work. Also of considerable interest is the implication that simple either/or taxonomy is insufficient:
As for the inferences which may be made from the above survey, one is clearly that many current critical assumptions have a limited historical context. In our day an ironic provincialism, which looks everywhere in literature for complete objectivity, suspension of moral judgements, concentration on pure verbal craftsmanship, and similar virtues, is in the ascendant. A Romantic provincialism, which looks everywhere for genius and evidences of great personality, is more old-fashioned, but it is still around. The high mimetic mode also had its pedants, some of them still trying to apply canons of ideal form in the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries. The suggestion made here is that no set of critical standards derived from only one mode can ever assimilate the whole truth about poetry.
Chiming as it does with my own as-yet-unformed “folksonomic mixing desk” theory of genre, this approach to analysing a text appeals to me greatly… and more than ever before makes it clear to me that I really need to read a great many more books written before 1900 than I have to date!
Paper Knife 
Good intro Paul, thanks.I must admit that I struggled with this one for much the same reasons you seemed to, namely that I had not read that many of the works he mentioned either. What's worse is that rather than systematically unpacking his references to texts (i.e. this illustrates this point for reasons X, Y and Z) he's frequently make quite oblique references to the text and then press on assuming that his readers were familiar with the texts and leaving it at that.Without wanting to continue my obsession with his methodology, this struck me as being completely at odds with his stated goal of ground-up empiricism.If your goal is to create a science of criticism then it strikes me that you should begin with raw data and work your way up but it seems to me that he does the exact opposite of this — namely he begins with theory (Aristotle) and then mentions works as he goes about elaborating his theory.I had read Aristotle's Poetics and had a few vague notions of
There's a fairly detailed exposition of Frye's theory of modes in Robert Denham's NORTHROP FRYE AND CRITICAL METHOD, which is now online at http://fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/critical-method/preface.html
I've thought long and hard about this essay, and changed my mind about it several times, but I'm coming to the conclusion that my problem is not with the modes but with the notion of historical criticism. There is a point in the third essay where he talks of romance "using that term to mean, not the historical mode of the first essay, but the tendency, noted later in the same essay, to displace myth in a human direction and yet, in contrast to 'realism', to conventionalize content in an idealized direction". Now apart from recognising this admission that he is using terms inconsistently, I have to say that I find the second use of romance more valuable than the first.Historical criticism ties literature to periods in a way that doesn't actually happen. (I'm an equal opportunity denier, by the way, since I criticise Frederic Jameson for his periodising tendencies also.) The modes don't work as signifiers of historical periods. Are the poems of Sappho mythic in the same way as the plays of Sophocles? Are the Superman comics of the 1950s less mythic? Is a novel like Thorne Smith's Night Life of the Gods mythic because of its straightforward acceptance of the Greek gods, or ironic because of its comic form?When I first read the essay I made a note that he presents European literature as moving down the modal scale, from the high point of the mythic to the low point of the ironic (and I get a strong impression that Frye really does see it as a decline), and I wrote "I wonder if sf can be an attempt to reclaim the higher modes?" Then I decided to omit that comment because it seemed trivial. Now, I'm not so sure, I have a feeling that there is something serious buried in the point, something to do with the way modes are most interesting when escape their periods.For instance, he says at one point: "Tragedy belongs chiefly to … fifth-century Athens and seventeenth-century Europe … Both belong to a period of social history in which an aristocracy is fast losing its effective power but still retains a good deal of ideological prestige." And I felt, this isn't true in terms of political history, and its not true in terms of tragedy. What about those great tragic Russian novels of the 19th century, written at a period when the aristocracy seemed at the height of its power?I feel there are two related problems in taking these modes as historical. The first is the simple fact that fictions don't restrict themselves to the dominant mode of their period, and indeed often employ multiple modes. The second is that the devolution of literature sketched in Frye's modes is both accelerating and closed. Accelerating in that the periods become shorter as we approach the present; closed in that the schema admits of no further modes after the ironic. But the haste of acceleration implies at least one further period must have happened in the half-century since Frye published his work, with more to follow. You can only take modes as an historical approach to literature if we assume that history has come to a stop.
If we periodize modes, then each mode must remain separate from its fellows. A later mode might borrow from earlier ones, but earlier ones clearly cannot benefit from any that are later. And mostly, because the mode is an expression of the forms that thought might take during any particular historic period, then the modes really have to remain distinct. And yet Frye himself specifically denies this point when he says: "For while one mode constitutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the other four may be simultaneously present" Now I am very happy to go along with this relativism, but it does expressly contradict the historical view hitherto asserted. And he builds on this perception when he goes on to say: "Through such an analysis we may come to realise that the two essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its own time and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed but complementary facts." And again: "no set of critical standards derived from only one mode can ever assimilate the whole truth about poetry."I got the sense, during the course of this essay, that he was contradicting himself, or at the very least changing his mind as he went along. I am more comfortable with where the essay ends up than I am with where it starts.
I'm not sure that Frye's trying to anchor the modes to specific periods as much as he's trying to show periods at which the modes in question were dominant/popular, if that makes any sense; so not so much "mode X occurred in civilisation Y during Century Z", but more "you can see the pattern I'm talking about happening here" – and his insistence that multiple modes cohabit a single work seems to reinforce that to some extent. Then again, that could be me retconning my own po-mo view of things on top of Frye's actual ideas; as I mentioned above, I think the stirrings of po-mo are there to see in Frye's uncertainty and caveats, even though they hadn't hung a shingle on the concept by that point.Leading on from that:"… I wrote "I wonder if sf can be an attempt to reclaim the higher modes?" Then I decided to omit that comment because it seemed trivial. Now, I'm not so sure, I have a feeling that there is something serious buried in the point, something to do with the way modes are most interesting when escape their periods."I was intrigued by how easily you can see sf ranging over the earlier modes, and – going by my admittedly shallow knowledge of the pulp and golden ages – I think the general progress down the modes and back up again can be seen over sf's own history. (Indeed, if we take the mythpunkers at their own word, they're ironically recolonising the very top of the modal stack.)But yeah, agreed that Frye's set-up here is useless if considered as being anchored solidly in time, so the historical side of his argument doesn't help me hugely; the modes themselves, though – probably because they're a new system to me – are an interesting way of looking at stories.
There's a point, in the third essay, where he talks in passing about the ironic mode in its late phase when it turns into myth. This is not something that I took from the first essay, but it does suggest that he sees the modes as cyclical rather than co-existent. But I don't think that the cyclical view can really be supported. At least, there's no suggestion that, historically, we've cycled through the different modes before now, so what is there to suggest that the ironic mode does turn back into the mythic?
I quite like the idea that we can use Northrop Frye as a source for claiming that New Space Opera is an ironic return to the mythic Space Opera.The idea that modes can be cyclical rather than teleological also helps SF to escape from the idea that current work is the descendant of everything from the Pulps through the New Wave and on. However, I am tempted to wonder whether our genre has enough history to have genuinely gone through the series of modes.