Northop Frye

Northrop Frye – Essay 1 of Anatomy of Criticism

I found the introduction to Anatomy of Criticism uninspiring, but the first essay, “Theory of Modes,” was rewarding. In it, Frye divides literature up into five main modes, in descending order: mythic, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony. The mythic mode is about gods and demi-gods (the hero is different in kind from us); the romance is about a hero who exists in a world close to ours, but one in which “the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended” (33) (the hero is different in degree from us); the high mimetic mode takes place in a world just like ours, but follows a leader or other important people (the hero is just like us, but with greater authority and passions); the low mimetic mode doesn’t seem to have a hero, as it just gives us a variety of normal people; in the ironic mode, the subjects are inferior to us in “power or intelligence” and thus “we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity” (34). As Frye points out, as works like Ulysses seem to blend the ironic and the mythic, it turns out that these are not hierarchical distinctions, but circular ones.

As always, I read with an eye to naturalism. It seems clearly that naturalism represents a tragic mode, and thus it is at times either a tragic low mimetic mode or a tragic ironic mode. Frye describes the low mimetic (domestic) tragedy as the expression of the sensation of pathos. He states “the root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong” (39). This seems to be the perfect definition for the low mimetic version of naturalism: in The Damnation of Theron Ware, in An American Tragedy, in Martin Eden and other novels a young man attempts to join a slightly higher social group and fails. And the young man in each of these cases is on our level not in terms of class, but in terms of intelligibility; he can speak and be understood. Furthermore, the contrast to the low mimetic tragedy is the Horatio Alger story; it is exactly like low mimetic version of naturalism, except that this time lower class individual is accepted into the next social class (45).

But the next step down, the ironic mode, gives us the works of Zola, of Hamlin Garland, and the great novel McTeague. In this ironic tragedy, the fiction writer “pretends to know nothing” (40); unlike a London or Harold, who beats us over the head with the various philosophies that offer up different values for life, there are absolutely no articulate characters proposed in this kind of life. Frye puts it this way: “Thus pity and fear are not raised in ironic art: they are reflected to the reader from the art” (40). The author has absented himself from judging the circumstances; he simply puts them on the page for the reader to see, and pretends “to know nothing, even that he is ironic” (40). And Frye agrees with my central tenet: that the force that sends the hero into his spiral is random. “Thus the central principle of tragic irony is that whatever happens to the hero should be causally out of line with his character […] Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be” (41). As much sense as this makes for the works Frye is discussing (such as The Trial) it doesn’t seem that useful for my understanding of naturalism. Or rather, it is useful insofar as it gives an explanation for why the works of naturalism operate as tragedies of the arbitrary, but not why the authors think such a system would be compatible with naturalism.

This connect up for me to something that Frye notes in the introduction; when discussing how authors are frequently not the best critics of their own work, Frye quotes John Stuart Mill: "the artist [...] is not heard but overheard" (5). I don't think that's uniformly true; for Frye, I think that's supposed to explain why Ibsen is not a good critic of Ibsen, because we are supposed to overhear Ibsen's ideas (in his art) not hear them (in his direct commentary to us). But I think this distinction becomes problematic/interesting when we apply it to the low mimetic/ironic distinction. We can only overhear the artist who pretends to know nothing; we must overhear the message of Zola. But we can hear Jack London loud and clear in some of his books; when his characters spout philosophies based on the works that he himself has read, it becomes hard not to hear him. And of course we hear him in The Jungle as well, in which he has a brief cameo as a socialist speaker.

More tidbits:

Frye describes naturalism’s movement from low mimetic to irony: “On the other hand, the term ‘naturalism’ shows up in its proper perspective as a phase of fiction which, rather like the detective story, though in a very different way, begins as an intensification of the low mimetic, an attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic of that attempt, in pure irony. Thus Zola’s obsession with ironic formulas gave him a reputation as a detached recorder of the human scene” (49)

Naturalism as a fringe version of literature; if literature is a different mode of language, more interested in putting together words in a certain way than simply conveying knowledge, then “literature goes about as far as a representation of life, to be judged by its accuracy of description rather than by its integrity of a structure of words, as it could go and still remain literature” (80)

Finally I want to extract from Frye the idea of the "green world" in comedy which Cavell makes so much of, and which I've argued that Deleuze has inverted. Frye writes: "We may call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph and love and life over the waste land...Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world" (182). This sounds exactly like Deleuze's argument that naturalistic cinema represents the fusion of an originary world and a real milieu, as displayed in Stroheim's Blind Husbands. But in Blind Husbands, everything is reversed: the suitor is in fact an interloper, and the blocking father figure is in fact a husband. And yet the suitor seems to have been successful, until we see that, in contrast to the comedy, the note the woman gives him is actually a repudiation of his interests. And we find that out while the suitor and the husband are on the peak, and there, in a terribly bleak green world, they behave like animals to one another, and the result is the death of the suitor. Cinematic naturalism, at least, seems to be the exact inverse of Frye's "new comedy," and that starts with the fact that the simple and pastoral "green world" has become an "originary world" of cruel impulses.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

I doubt that Quicksand is often associated with naturalism. And yet, I found many of the hallmarks of naturalism in it. The protagonist, Helga Crane, is looking for happiness. And that happiness is, from the start, problematized by race. She's unhappy in the U.S. because she naturally gravitates to a class of black intellectuals. And while she enjoys their company, she can't handle the rigid, Booker T. Washington style of education of Naxos, where she briefly teaches. In NYC, she seems to have found a preferable mode of being, but all the intellectuals there are obsessed with "the race problem," and particularly obsessed with the horrors of miscegenation. As the child of a white mother and black man, Helga is frequently the brunt of unwitting insults.

In true naturalist fashion, Helga tries to escape her problems through a change in environment, and moves to Denmark to live with her mother's rich relatives. Here she begins what can only be considered a life of decadence: going to nice parties, wearing expensive clothes, and being painted and courted by Axel Olsen, a man who is both rich and an artist. But being exoticized in Denmark, and having no other black people around, eventually grows old, and Helga decides that she needs to have a partitioned life, splitting time between Europe and America. "This knowledge, this certainty of the division of her life into two parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual freedom in America, was unfortunate, inconvenient, expensive."

But even this solution doesn't hold up; Helga's friend Anne has married her old superior at Naxos, Dr. James Anderson, who Helga holds an unbreakable yearning for. They kiss once, she imagines a future between them, but he makes it clear that the kiss was a mistake. Helga decides abruptly to marry a rural Southern preacher, and thrusts herself into the world that most subjects of naturalism work to escape; Quicksand is thus a version of reverse naturalism, in which the intellectual, who could live a rich life in Denmark or an intellectual one in Harlem, voluntarily descends into a life of hard work and poverty. At first she dislikes the life, but eventually accepts it by accepting faith in God: "Her religion was to her a kind of protective covering, shielding her from the cruel light of an unbearable reality" (117). But the horror of her third childbirth destroys this faith: "Because, she knew now, He wasn't there. Didn't exist. into that yawning gap of unspeakable brutality had gone, too, her belief in the miracle and wonder of life" (120). And in keeping with this naturalistic view of life, her infant perishes in less than a week, lacking the "vitality" to survive (121). But the novel ends with Helga still trapped in her miserable environment; although she's discovered that the Negroes are trapped by their belief in the "white man's God," she doesn't quite have the physical strength to leave the town yet (123). And the novel ends: "And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child" (125).

To return to my original point: I wouldn't necessarily think of this as a naturalistic novel. And yet, it's depiction of a world without meaning, of people trapped in an unalterable environment, and it's obsession with the importance of race (something that Helga both discounts and accepts) it seems similar in many ways to naturalism. Which leads me to the question: is the question of race simultaneous a question of naturalism? Or, to put it in another way, could an African American novelist write a book in the first part of the 20th century that didn't share many of the concerns of naturalism? I think this is possibly an essay question; it's also something to think about in the highly naturalist work of Richard Wright (and his move from the naturalistic despair of Native Son to the mild optimism of Black Boy) and in the racial theories of Alain Locke.

Frost

I've never liked Frost, but he's certainly not unique among poets. This is the most extending reading I've ever done of him, which tells you something, since it was only like 15 pages of Frost. But here's what I think now:

He's certainly enjoyable to read, particularly as his style is so rural and thus readable. He's also not in the slightest bit naturalist, and also not terribly transcendentalist. (His lack of naturalism comes in spite of the fact that his poems are often very bleak and interested in "decay") He does seem to have been quite an individualist, and fascinated by nature. He was also very clearly swimming against the modernist tide, by producing such readable and mostly clear poems.

I was stunned to find the famous "The Road Not Taken" to be more complex than I realized. The famous declaration that taking the less traveled road made all the difference is actually undercut, first by the acknowledgement that, although that road does look less traveled, "Though as for that, the passing there/Had worn them really about the same." And the looking back doesn't actually take place, but is imagined "I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:" I'm inclined to think that the "difference" the road made was actually trivial; the significance on this moment comes from the speaker's choice, not because the road actually made a difference or was even actually much less traveled.

A poem like "The Wood-Pile" is much more to my liking. In it, the speaker is wandering alone, far from home, and encounters a little bird which fearfully hides from him. The speaker forgets the bird and frightens him, and the bird hides behind a woodpile which someone has cut and carefully stacked, but has rested here for a long time, about to lose structural integrity, overgrown by the vine Clematis, and completely abandoned by its creator. "I thought that only/Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks/Could so forget his handiwork on which/He spent himself, the labor of his az,/And leave it there far from a useful fireplace/To warm the frozen swamp as best it could/With the slow smokeless burning of decay." A bleak image, but one that also strikes me as beautiful.

Two more poems, The Death of the Hired Man, about an inconstant hired man who has come "home" to die, and "Home Burial," about a couple torn apart by the death of their son and the wife's perception that the husband did not feel it deeply enough, seem like the best candidates for naturalist readings. They do seem to have the pall of rural death and despair hanging over them, and thus in many ways could fit into Main-Traveled roads or a like set of stories. But they also seem, to me, to be lacking the deterministic and scientific underpinnings of naturalism; the deaths haunting them are more Romantic than naturalistic.

Stroheim

Blind Husbands

Blind Husbands is a very good film, made by and starring Stroheim based on a novel he wrote. THe film opens with a title card noting that "alienation of affection" is a frequent cause for divorce, and when it occurs the blame is usually put on the wife and the other man, if there is one. But, it asks, what about the husband, who has stopped wooing the wife with his "wiles" in his complacency?

The husband and his wife are in town for him to climb a mountain. As a doctor, he's called away several times to help people, and Lt. Steuben (Stroheim) takes those opportunities to romance the wife. He seems to have done so successfully; she promises to run away with him. When Steuben and the doctor are at the top of the pinnacle, the husband finds a letter from his wife on Steuben, which Steuben knocks away. When the husband demands truth, Steuben admits that the wife is running away with him (which the husband already suspected) and he leaves Steuben on the peak to die.

Coming down the mountain, Dr. Armstrong finds the letter: his wife rescinded her promise to Steuben, explaining it was just to get out of an awkward situation, and she loves her husband. Armstron wants to rescue Steuben but falls off the mtn. Steuben has rescuers coming, but is frightened by the spirit of the mountain (a very expressionistic specter) and falls to his death; the film notes that the spirit is satisfied. The husband and wife are reunited.

Deleuze has argued that Stroheim is the director of entropic degeneration and Bunuel is the director of cyclical degeneration. This film does not bear that out. We see a young honeymooning couple, deeply in love, and they observe Armstrong's inattention and vow never to be that way. And Armstrong does seem to degenerate; after suspecting his wife, he reads a plaque (complete with a soul descending into hell) that explains that a lover was killed by a jealous husband on the mountain. Thus his marriage (once like the honeymooners) and his morals have degenerated, so he attempts to leave Steuben to his death. But the note brings him full circle. He no longer wishes Steuben to die, and is redeemed. And the final scene shows the two couples leaving side by side, with the mountain guide imploring armstrong to love his wife. They may not be as lovey-dovey as the honeymooners, but they do seem to be in love. In this film, degeneration seems to be cyclical, and things come full circle.

Foolish Wives
For this film, I was more interested in watching a movie and less interested in examining how it fit in with Deleuze's analysis, and perhaps for that reason enjoyed it much more. But it also seems to me a much more mature work; it legendarily cost more than $1 million, far above the budget Stroheim was given, and it was worth it. Stroheim plays Karamzin, a false count romancing a naive American woman, but he also romances everyone else. He and his fake cousins, also fake nobility, survive using counterfeit bills, and Karamzin lusts after the counterfeiters mentally challenged daughter. He also seduces his cousin's servant, convincing her to give him her entire life savings. Finally he does seduce the American, the wife of the Ambassador to Monaco, and is going to get 100000 francs of gambling winnings from her, but the jilted and cheated servant ruins the tryst by setting the house on fire. The pair survive, but Karamzin's credibility is ruined by the fact that he escaped the house first, and that his tryst was discovered.

The movie ends in a brutal way. We see several things happen: 1. the servant kills herself 2. Karamzin sneaks into the bedroom of the American, possibly awakening the manservant in the house 3. the "cousins" are arrested and exposed as frauds 4. the manservant drags something out of the house slowly, and opens a manhole to throw it away. it seems to be a body, and just as he's about to throw it away, the hood fall off and we see that it is Karamzin. the corpse is thrown in the manhole. 5. the husband points out to the wife that the end of the book she's reading (Foolish Wives by Stroheim)

One of the film's chief accomplishments is creating the "milieu" of Monte Carlo - a decadent and degenerate city - on the backlots of Hollywood. Keith Phipps (quote from Wikipdia) writes: "Foolish Wives re-creates Monte Carlo in a Hollywood back lot...Playing a fraudulent aristocrat, in a touch that echoed his own biography, Von Stroheim dupes the gullible, lusts after a retarded teenager, and attempts to undo an innocent American. It's like a Henry James novel as dreamt by a pornographer, and it illustrates what makes Von Stroheim such a problematic genius: Is it nascent post-modernism or egotism run amok that made him prominently feature a character reading a novel called Foolish Wives, credited to Erich Von Stroheim?" The Henry James analogy is very most telling; I might have put it: "It's like a Henry James novel imagined by a naturalist" or, in more Deleuzian terms, "It's like a Henry James novel in which the real milieu of Europe is corrupted by an originary world of impulses, represented here by a swamp."

Edgar Lee Masters

I had never heard of the minor American poet Edgar Lee Masters, but he seems to be, if not a naturalist, someone who is interesting in terms of naturalism, which I did not much expect to find in poetry. The Norton Anth of Am Lit describes his most important work, Spoon River Anthology, in terms that sound very much like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Garland's Main-Traveled Roads: the dead speakers of interrelated poems in the anthology "continue their loves and quarrels beyond the grave. Their dissonant voices converge in a lament for suppressed and wasted lives, only rarely varied by joy or gusto. Sex has driven them, but given little pleasure. They long for the sympathy that they withhold from each other. Yet the poems as a group are compassionate, not judgmental" (1101). Save for that last line, that sounds like a perfectly naturalist description. And individual poems also seem to take up naturalist points.

Serepta Mason believes that she could have flowered in life, but a "bitter wind" prevented her from. Like Maggie, her environment prevented her growth. "Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed/Who do not know the ways of the wind/And the unseen forces/That govern the processes of life." This sounds like a perfectly naturalistic account of the complex social forces that prevent the seed of humanity from flowering.

Trainor, the Druggist notes that, like chemicals, people's offspring are the unpredictable outcome of contending forces. "There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,/Good in themselves, but evil towards each other:/He oxygen, she hydrogen, /Their son, a devastating fire." In this poem, people are just chemical elements, and their offspring are the product of a chemical reaction. That's not far from a naturalist theory of offspring and racial stock.

Margaret Fuller Slack's poem is a feminist lament; she could have been another George Eliot "But for an untoward fate." The poem ends with a pun; after marrying the druggist (seemingly not Trainor) who promised her leisure time to write a novel, Mrs. Slack bears 8 children and dies of lockjaw after piercing herself with a needle while washing for a baby. She concludes "Sex is the curse of life!" Both sex (as her gender) and sex (as the force that engendered her children) locked her into her fate.

Abel Melveny's situation doesn't make too much sense; he hoarded "every kind of machine that's known" but, with no use for most of them and no shed to store them in, had to watch them "Getting rusted, warped, and battered." After noting that he never used a fine machine, he concludes "I saw myself as a good machine/That Life had never used." Abel, like his tools, was an automaton, who, due to the hand of fate, never saw use.

Lucinda Matlock has the only really positive poem; her life is a catalog of pleasure taking and joyous events, save for the fact that she lost 8 of her 12 children. But she takes a naturalist stance towards those that she sees not enjoying life around her: "What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness/Anger, discontent, and drooping hopes?/Degenerate sons and daughters,/Life is too strong for you -/It takes life to love life." Lucinda here, I think, is referencing the reservoir; only by bringing energy to life can one make something of life. This, like the difference between Clyde Griffiths and his cousin, makes all the difference: strong drives can bring pleasure, the lack of drives results in degeneration.

Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger

Ragged Dick is the first book in Alger's Richard Hunter series, about the rise of of young Dick from penniless bootblack to, presumably, titan of finance. It is also Alger's first novel. As such, it is the perfect example of anti-naturalism: a book which has all the same basic elements of naturalism (impoverished people in an urban area) but which writes their story in a positive light.

As with naturalism, physical appearance plays a great part in determining how once can judge someone. Over and over, Alger points out that people trust Dick because he "had a frank, straight-forward manner that made him a favorite" (4). The face is the window to the soul; physiognomy is as strong here as in naturalism.

One way to think about Ragged Dick is to perceive it as the story of American Tragedy, if Clyde's cousin were the penniless up and comer. Over and over, Dreiser points out that, although Clyde is handsomer than his cousin, he's less driven and ambitious. He does not burn with a fire to succeed. Alger makes this same point about Dick by repeatedly comparing him to the fellow bootblack Johnny, who does not succeed because he's lazy. Johnny "was a good-natured boy, large of his age, with nothing particularly bad about him, but utterly lacking in that energy, ambition, and natural sharpness, for which Dick was distinguished" (125).

Dick also meets good fortune after good fortune; he's constantly thrown into situations that will lead to his success. The most outrageous of these is when his friend Fosdick applies for a job at a hat shop, which just happens to be the hat shop where the boys' sunday school teacher teaches, who just happens to walk in during the interview and recommend Fosdick( 95). This, and many other coincidences, are the counter to the negative coincidences that take place in naturalism and bring about the downfall of the naturalist subjects. And of course, sometimes in naturalism these chances (Trina winning the lottery, Clyde running into his uncle and obtaining employment) seem, like Dick's chances, to hold promise. They just never do.

I can see the appeal of these books. Dick is a charming character, and although Alger's style is repetitive, it's charming enough. I was personally revolted by the right wing platitudes all through the book; this is the ur-novel for those who believe that the poor need to just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But I can also understand it's appeal for the second half of the 19th century, as a document fully embracing and encouraging the American dream.